In the case of either principal components analysis or factor analysis, you should first examine a number of factorability statistics and tests.
Essentially, you wish to ascertain whether it makes sense to proceed with the principal components analysis or factor analysis. Essentially, you wish to establish that the variables are mutually correlated to some extent. At one extreme, if the variables in the analysis are unrelated, then it makes no sense to proceed with an analysis. At the other extreme, one or more variables might be redundant given other variables in the analysis. In this situation, you might proceed by removing redundant variables from the analysis.
In this section, we consider the following ...
