Fourth, we used global model comparisons across the sexes and on that basis interpreted the resulting parameters as differing in males and females. However, we could have tested each individual parameter for equality across the sexes, letting the other parameters be free to differ. We did not do this because we were interested in global sex effects. Furthermore, with complex models like these, free parameters can sometimes ‘absorb’ the effects of constrained parameters, making interpretation of global changes in model fitting problematic. Thus, some of the individual factor loadings that we interpret as different across sexes might not have been significantly different had they been tested individually in this way.
