3.5 Factor analysis of the revised

3.5 Factor analysis of the revised MTS
Given the results of our CFA and the IRT analysis, we re- vised the MTS to a six-item structure by removing items 1, 7 and 8 (see Table 4). We conducted a CFA (again us- ing our CFA sample) test on this revised structure and found that it met all of our criteria for model fit as a unidimensional model (see ’). Further, the reduction in the overall model chi-square statistic from the previous models suggests that our revised scale is a more parsimonious, unidimensional version of the MTS. The new revised scale is presented in Table 6.
3.6 Correlation analysis
The revised MS and MTS scales, and the original MS, MS Short (Nenkov et al. 2008) and MTS were subjected to correlation analysis with various other psychological constructs often linked to maximizing including: indecisiveness, avoidance, regret, neuroticism, life satisfaction,
depression, happiness, optimism and need for cognition. Table 7 provides descriptive statistics, correlations and reliabilities for the various psychological constructs. It should be noted that with such a large sample size small correlations would be significant.
Following Rim et al. (2011) and Nenkov et al. (2008) when using the MS Short we examined each factor separately. The reliabilities for the factors in the MS Short were all low. Although the reliabilities for the factors in the Revised MS Short were also low they were higher than the original MS Short. In regards to the MTS, our revised scale (.79) has slightly higher reliability than the original MTS (.78). Thus, it appears that removing low information items did not negatively affect the reliability of the scale.
Similar to previous research (Schwartz et al., 2002; Nenkov et al., 2008) the original 13-item MS significantly correlates positively with indecisiveness, avoidance, regret, neuroticism, and depression. The MS also significantly correlates negatively with happiness and optimism, but is unrelated to life satisfaction.
The Nenkov et al. (2008) MS was examined by each factor separately. The alternative search factor (Nenkov et al. (2008) MS-A) significantly correlated positively with indecisiveness, avoidance, and regret. However it was unrelated to neuroticism, life satisfaction, depression, happiness, optimism, and need for cognition.