Demystifying Factor Analysis:

About the Book

Factor analysis is a powerful data reduction technique that has been widely used in the fields of psychology and education to explore personality, psychopathology, human abilities, and other facets of the human condition. More recently it has been applied to variables of interest in other fields of endeavor, including medicine, marketing, and geology. Factor analysis was designed to help researchers working with complex correlational datasets to identify a simpler set of latent, explanatory dimensions (factors) underlying a pattern of inter-correlations. Once identified, these factors were expected to improve our measurement strategies as well as our understanding of basic theoretical concepts. Despite this promise, the practical use of factor analysis has been limited to date not only by methodological disputes based on statistical grounds, but also by a pervasive belief that factor analysis is inherently mysterious and requires both psychometric intuition and the convergence of evidence from many statistical and analytical sources to correctly identify factor structures among a given group of variables. Not surprisingly, there has been little agreement over the factor structure of most questionnaires and scales developed to date using this approach. Our book addresses these roadblocks as the reader is walked through the practical steps used in conducting a factor analysis using simple worked examples. We provide an elegant yet logical approach to the practical use of factor analysis based on the work of Raymond B. Cattell that eschews the conventional wisdom, and is alternately based on the principal of factor replicability. Finally, we direct the interested reader to a new website that provides a user-friendly research tool (FACTOREP) that will help them identify replicable and therefore scientifically illuminating interpretations of their data.

About the Author

Frank Walkey, PhD began his teaching and research career in the Department of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 1965, rising to Associate Professor during his tenure at the university. His main teaching and research interests have been in the fields of social psychology and psychological measurement, where he has published or co-authored close to a hundred papers. His special interest has been in the application of factor analysis to psychological measurement. Garry Welch, PhD is a behavioral medicine researcher and Director of Behavioral Medicine Research at Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, Ma. He is Research Associate Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and was a reviewer for 5 years on the Behavioral Medicine Interventions and Outcomes (BMIO) grants review committee at the National Institutes of Health. His research interests include the behavioral and medical management of chronic medical conditions such as type 2 diabetes and obesity as well as the use of telemedicine and patient-centered interventions for patients with these conditions. He began his research career as a doctoral fellow interested in psychometrics and behavioral medicine under the mentorship of Dr. Walkey in New Zealand. He has a long standing interest in the use of factor analysis to evaluate measures of health-related quality of life and psychological adjustment.