DISCRIMINANT ANALYSIS AS A CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS TOOL: AN EXAMPLE FROM MATERIALISM MEASUREMENT

This research work is a confirmatory analysis using the data from the materialism measurement study published in 2016. Primary objective of this this study is to validate the ability of discriminant analysis, as a classification method that can predict the group membership of a newly sampled observation. The original study was based on a sample of 530 from three south Indian cities, and used a regression analysis based model that showed the existence of moderate to high levels of materialism among the respondents. Researcher, using CDA developed ‘Canonical Discriminant Function Coefficients' and the predictor model. Further, using the group means of the predictor variables termed centroids, the study differentiates the respondents as low materialism and high materialism groups. Classification of the results, showed that CDA based classification of materialistic values had high level of matching, for both the low materialism and the high materialism groups, with those grouped using the regression analysis. This, inturn validates the ability of CDA to predict group membership based on materialism