The Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Effectiveness of Community Empowerment in the Malay and Chinese

Abstract

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) is conducted in the measurement model and there are two ways to conduct CFA through individual confirmatory factor analysis or group confirmatory factor analysis. It depends on how many items are in the construct and if the items in the construct have more than four, the measurement model analysis is conducted separately. Whereas, pooled CFA runs all measurement models at the same time. This Unidimensionality requirement can be met through the item deletion procedure that has a low factor loading value to reach the set level of fitness indexes. Items with a factor loading value of less than 0.6 are considered unimportant to the measurement of the construct and can be discarded (Chik & Abdullah, 2018). A total of 600 randomly selected community members were involved in this research, among 300 Malay communities and 300 Chinese communities in the East Coast state, Peninsular Malaysia. Data were analyzed using the IBM-SPSS-AMOS (SEM) program version 21.0. Adjustment tests were conducted to ensure that the tested indicators truly represent the construct being measured and Confirmatory Factor Analysis was conducted in this study as a prerequisite that must be met. The findings of the study show that all the correlations between the constructs religion (based on practices, philosophy of life and morality), socio-culture (based on lifestyle, cultural customs, family culture and education), community (based on environment, information, support and challenges) and socio-economics, have a value less than 0.85 (<0.85) among dealing with drug addiction among the Malay and Chinese communities in the East Coast states, Peninsular Malaysia. The results of the combined confirmatory factor analysis of all measurement models (Pooled CFA), prove that all constructs do not have a strong relationship with each other to avoid the existence of multicollinearity problems.