Visualization in the assessment of construct validity

Abstract

It is common to quantify the concept of interest in the social and human sciences to test a research hypothesis. In such a case, it is strongly recommended to investigate if the procedure is appropriately designed and implemented according the research purpose since the quantification procedure highly affects the result of statistical analysis. In this work, we propose a visualization tool which enables us to check the construct validity of a measurement tool (such a questionnaire) in a concise and convenient way based on a penalized factor analysis model. We illustrate our method with numerical simulation and real data analysis.