Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

How Do the Criteria Compare?

Now that we are familiar with the different extraction criteria and the SAS syntax and output for each criterion, let’s examine the potential differences between the criteria. We will review these criteria in each of our three data sets and see how the criteria agree or disagree.

Engineering data. We examined each of the criteria for this data in the section above. The theory, the Kaiser Criterion, the minimum eigenvalue, and the proportion of variance recommend a two-factor solution; the scree plot recommends a two-factor solution, but also identifies a possible three-factor solution; and both MAP and parallel analysis recommend a two-factor solution. In general, when we use a scale that generally has a strong ...