Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

EFA vs PCA

As you will come to learn, EFA is quite different from PCA. Unfortunately, there are many misconceptions about the two analyses, and one of the biggest is that PCA is part of, or synonymous with, EFA. This misconception probably has modern day roots from at least two factors:

1. Statistical software, including SAS, has PCA as the default extraction technique when performing exploratory factor analysis.
2. Many modern researchers use PCA and EFA interchangeably, or use PCA when performing an analysis that is more appropriate for EFA.

Although the two methods generally seem to do the same thing, they are different in some key ways. Principal components analysis is a computationally simplified version of a general class of dimension ...