Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

A Tool for Exploration

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is a statistical tool used for exploring the underlying structure of data. It was originally developed in the early 1900s during the attempt to determine whether intelligence is a unitary or multidimensional construct (Spearman, 1904). It has since served as a general-purpose dimension reduction tool with many applications. In the modern social sciences it is often used to explore the psychometric properties of an instrument or scale. Exploratory factor analysis examines all the pairwise relationships between individual variables (e.g., items on a scale) and seeks to extract latent factors from the measured variables. During the 110 years since Spearman’s seminal work in this area, few ...