The present study illustrates the application and the utility of confirmatory second-order factor analytic methods. Factor analysis is central to concerns regarding measurement validity. Confirmatory methods are especially useful, because they explicitly consider measurement error influences, and because the methods are inherently theory-driven and theory-oriented. Second-order confirmatory methods, not applied with great frequency in the literature, offer the promise of allowing the researcher to explore more thoroughly a reality which many see as being just as complex as some of the models that researchers have been led to formulate. To make the explanation of applying confirmatory second-order methods more concrete, a data set involving responses of 487 subjects to the Hendrick-Hendrick love instrument is analyzed for heuristic purposes.
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