Chunk #22 — Three methods to decide between latent dimensionality and latent categories — Meehl’s taxometric procedures

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Does nature have joints worth carving? A discussion of taxometrics, model-based clustering and latent variable mixture modeling.

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The basic structure consists of first deriving theoretical expectations from premises, and then checking these expectations against observed data. Specifically, the procedures evaluate whether the summary statistics of the observed items (means, covariances or eigenvalues, depending on the procedure) behave according to the expectations regarding these statistics under the hypothesis of taxonicity, or according to the expectations under the hypothesis of dimensionality. The term ‘coherent cut kinetics’ (Meehl, 1995) refers to the fact that the behavior of the summary statistics is evaluated for different partitions or ‘cuts’ of one of the observed items.