A S L 3 Lecture 18: wqoih9
Document Summary
It is a method of grouping similar items/variables together, e. g. questions on a questionnaire! 2 reasons for factor analysis: to reduce a large no. of variables, to detect a structure in the relationships between the variables. Exploratory factor analysis is a method of detecting and grouping items that share something in common. In factor analysis we are interested in finding underlying construct that groups of items have in common. 2 types of fa: exploratory factor analysis (efa): to identify the hypothetical constructs in a set of data, confirmatory factor analysis (cfa): to confirm the existence of these constructs in (new) data. I am interested in attitudes towards statistics and create a 51-item questionnaire to measure this. I then need to know if all the questions are measuring one attitude or, whether there are a number of attitudes being measured. I also want to remove questions that do not really measure any of these attitudes.