Estimating the stability of the number of factors via Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis: A tutorial
Exploratory graph analysis (EGA) is a recent addition to the growing field of network psychometrics. EGA has emerged as a popular approach for estimating the dimensonality of data in networks. The appeal of EGA is the visualization of the relations between variables and the deterministic allocation of variables into dimensions. Notably, networks tend to be sample-specific, making reproducibility and generalizability a key issue in network psychometrics. To resolve this issue, we’ve developed a novel bootstrap approach called, Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis (bootEGA). bootEGA provides researchers with dimension and item stability statistics as well as item analyses that are akin to exploratory factor analysis loadings. We provide descriptions of bootEGA’s functions accompanied by a step-by-step R tutorial for how to apply and interpret bootEGA’s results. This tutorial is applied to real-world data to demonstrate its effectiveness at identifying problematic dimensions and items. In short, our results show that bootEGA is a robust approach for identifying the stability and robustness of dimensionality in data.