Person-Centered Methods: Configural Frequency Analysis (CFA) and Other Methods for the Analysis of Contingency Tables

Mark Stemmler

May 2014 · Springer

About this ebook

This book takes an easy-to-understand look at the statistical approach called the person-centered method. Instead of analyzing means, variances and covariances of scale scores as in the common variable-centered approach, the person-centered approach analyzes persons or objects grouped according to their characteristic patterns or configurations in contingency tables. The main focus of the book will be on Configural Frequency Analysis (CFA; Lienert and Krauth, 1975) which is a statistical method that looks for over and under-frequented cells or patterns. Over frequented means that the observations in this cell or configuration are observed more often than expected, under-frequented means that this cell or configuration is observed less often than expected. In CFA a pattern or configuration that contains more observed cases than expected is called a type; similarly, a pattern or configuration that is less observed than expected are called an antitype. CFA is similar to log-linear modeling. In log-linear modeling the goal is to come up with a fitting model including all important variables. Instead of fitting a model, CFA looks at the significant residuals of a log-linear model.

The book describes the use of an R-package called confreq (derived from Configural Frequency Analysis). The use of the software package is described and demonstrated with data examples.

About the author

Since 2011 Mark Stemmler is a Chair of Psychological Assessment, Quantitative Methods and Forensic Psychology at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He received his master’s degree from the Technical University Berlin in 1989 and his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 1993. In 2002, he received his postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. From 2007 to 2011 he was a full professor for quantitative methods at the Bielefeld University, Germany. His research interests encompass developmental psychology and methodology. He has worked on longitudinal studies in the US and Germany. His research emphasis on methodology is categorical data analysis.