Many latent traits in social sciences display a hierarchical structure, such as intelligence, cognitive ability, or personality. Usually a second-order factor is linearly related to a group of first-order factors (also called domain abilities in cognitive ability measures), and the first-order factors directly govern the actual item responses.…

Demonstrates that traditional exploratory factor analytic methods, when applied to correlation matrices, cannot be used to estimate unattenuated factor loadings. Presents a mathematical basis for the accurate estimation of such values when the disattenuated correlation matrix or the covariance matrix is used as input. Explains how the equations…