Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

Orthogonal vs Oblique Rotation

Conventional wisdom in the literature and many texts advise researchers to use orthogonal rotation because it produces more easily interpretable results, but this might be a flawed argument. In the social sciences (and many other sciences), we generally expect some correlation among factors, particularly scales that reside within the same instrument or questionnaire (i.e., shared method variance will generally produce nonzero correlations). In practice, even when we create factors using an orthogonal method, the factor scores (scores derived from the factor structure; see Chapter 9) are often correlated despite the orthogonal nature of the factors. Therefore, using orthogonal rotation results in a loss of valuable ...