Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

Example Syntax and Output

To get started, let’s review the syntax and output to produce a factor analysis of the engineering data (example data set 1 in Example data sets). We will use iterated PAF extraction and ask SAS to extract two factors since the items in the data generally represent two scales (please note, in Chapter 3 we will discuss the criteria to determine the number of factors to extract. The syntax to do this is presented below.

proc factor data = engdata  nfactors = 2  method = PRINIT  priors = SMC;
   var EngProbSolv1 EngProbSolv2 EngProbSolv3 EngProbSolv4 
      EngProbSolv5 EngProbSolv6 EngProbSolv7 EngProbSolv8
      INTERESTeng1 INTERESTeng2 INTERESTeng3 INTERESTeng4
      INTERESTeng5 INTERESTeng6;
run;

Since we are at heart lazy programmers who ...