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Estimating the Strength of a General Factor: Coefficient Omega Hierarchical

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Gilles E. Gignac
Gilles E. Gignac*
Affiliation:
School of Psychology, University of Western Australia
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gilles E. Gignac, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western Australia, 6009, Australia. E-mail: gilles.gignac@uwa.edu.au
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Extract

Relying on work described by Jackson (2003), Ree, Carretta, and Teachout (2015) recommended researchers use the first unrotated principal component associated with a principal components analysis (PCA) to estimate the strength of a general factor. Arguably, such a recommendation is based on rather old work. Furthermore, it is not a method that can be relied on to yield an accurate solution. For example, it is well known that the first component extracted from a correlation matrix of the Wechsler intelligence subtests is biased toward the verbal comprehension subtests (Ashton, Lee, & Vernon, 2001).

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 434 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2015 

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