NURS 7960 - Special Topics in Nursing

This proposed course will be fully on-line using videoconferencing technology. It will be offered to both on campus and distance doctoral students. It is intended to provide a sound theoretical and practical understanding of the logic and application of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses for instrument development in health care research. Topics will include an overview of the characteristics and assumptions of exploratory vs. confirmatory factor analysis; for exploratory factor analysis (EFA): issues related to the design and testing of an instrument, evaluating the characteristics of matrices, approaches to extracting initial factors, rotating the factors, evaluating, refining, interpreting factors, and reporting the EFA results; for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) the focus will be on model testing, setting up the measurement and path models, dealing with missing data, evaluation of the goodness of fit indices and path model fit, assessment of alternative and equivalent models, and reporting of the CFA results. SPSS for Windows will be used to conduct EFA; LISREL and SIMPLIS will be used for CFA.