Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) has emerged as a popular approach for estimating the dimensionality of data in psychometric networks. Sampling variability, however, has made reproducibility and generalizability a key issue in network psychometrics. To address this issue, we’ve developed a novel bootstrap approach called, Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis (bootEGA). bootEGA generates a sampling distribution of EGA results where several statistics can be computed. Descriptive statistics (median, standard error, and dimension frequency) provide researchers with a general sense of the stability of their empirical EGA dimensions. Structural consistency estimates how often dimensions are being replicated exactly across the bootstrap replicates. Item stability statistics provide information about whether dimensions are unstable due to misallocation (e.g., item placed in the wrong dimension), multidimensionality (e.g., item belonging to more than one dimension), and item redundancy (e.g., similar semantic content). Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we determine guidelines for acceptable item stability. After, we provide two empirical examples that demonstrate how bootEGA can be used to identify structural consistency issues (including a full reproducible R tutorial). In sum, we demonstrate that bootEGA is a robust approach for identifying the stability and robustness of dimensionality in multivariate data.