Assessing Goodness of Fit: Is Parsimony Always Desirable?
HERBERT W. MARSH University of Western Sydney, Macarthur KIT-TAI HAU The Chinese University of Hong Kong ABSTRACT. Many mechanistic rules of thumb for evaluating the goodness of fit of structural equation models (SEM) emphasize model parsimony; all other things being equal, a simpler, more parsimonious model with fewer estimated parameters is better than a more complex model. Although this is usually good advice, in the present article a heuristic counterexample is demonstrated in which parsimony as typically operationalized in indices of fit may be undesirable. Specifically, in simplex models of longitudinal data, the failure to include correlated uniquenesses relating the same indicators administered on different occasions will typically lead to sys- tematically inflated estimates of stability. Although simplex models with correlated uniquenesses are substantially less parsimonious and may be unacceptable accord- ing to mechanistic decision rules that penalize model complexity, it ca
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