Vera Costa

Rui Portocarrero Sarmento, Vera Costa

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) is a particular form of factor analysis, most commonly used in social research. In confirmatory factor analysis, the researcher first develops a hypothesis about what factors they believe are underlying the used measures and may impose constraints on the model based on these a priori hypotheses. For example, if two factors are accounting for the covariance in the measures, and these factors are unrelated to one another, we can create a model where the correlation between factor X and factor Y is set to zero. Measures could then be obtained to assess how well the fitted model captured the covariance between all the items or measures in the model. Thus, if the results of statistical tests of the model fit indicate a poor fit, the model will be rejected. If the fit is weak, it may be due to a variety of reasons. We propose to introduce state of the art techniques to do CFA in R language. Then, we propose to do some examples of CFA with R and some datasets, revealing several scenarios where CFA is relevant.

Rui Portocarrero Sarmento, André Tarrinho, Pedro Câmara et al.

When studying human-technology interaction systems, researchers thrive to achieve intuitiveness and facilitate the people's life through a thoughtful and in-depth study of several components of the application system that supports some particular business communication with customers. Particularly in the healthcare field, some requirements such as clarity, transparency, efficiency, and speed in transmitting information to patients and or healthcare professionals might mean an important increase in the well-being of the patient and productivity of the healthcare professional. In this work, the authors study the difficulties patients frequently have when communicating with pharmacists. In addition to a statistical study of a survey conducted with more than two hundred frequent pharmacy customers, we propose an IT solution for better communication between patients and pharmacists.