EXPLORATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS

The next two lessons are devoted to exploratory factor analysis. The two approaches are principal components analysis (PCA) and principal axis factoring (PAF). In truth, only PAF is considered factor analysis. I will explain why in the lesson.

These approaches are loosely termed exploratory because the statistical process (not the researcher) produces the factor (think scale or subscale) and identifies which items belong to it. This is contrasted with confirmatory approaches (which use structural equation modeling) where the researcher assigns items to factors and analyzes the goodness of fit.