PSYC 100 Lecture 12: PSYC 100 Winter 2015 Lecture Notes Weeks 1-12

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill Atkinson

Document Summary

Focuses on understanding and quantifying how individuals differ when it comes to traits such as intelligence, personality, or self-esteem. Galton believed that intelligence is based on biology and reasoned that it must be related to other biologically based phenomena. Factor analysis is a correlational technique - examines all of the correlations between all of the items and determines if any of them are highly correlated with each other. If a group of test items correlate highly with each other, factor analysis can provide evidence that they are measuring the same thing. Factor analysis is a form of mathematical modeling that examines a group of variables and looks for the underlying structure or dimensions that they share. The underlying dimensions are determined by calculating how well the observed variables can be explained in terms of a smaller number of variables, called factors.