How Many Factors?

Scholars have been arguing about this issue for the better part of a century. There are many who will argue passionately that one method is superior to another, and some methods do seem to be more defensible than others. However, it seems to me that much of the argument comes from a high-stakes mentality where researchers are attempting to confirm one factor structure as superior to another. Let us again repeat our mantra for this book: EFA is exploratory and should be considered a low-stakes process.
There are many guidelines for how to decide the number of factors to extract from an analysis. After all, your statistical software will extract as many factors as there are variables in the analysis, and since our goal is dimension ...

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