Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

Best Practices for EFA

This journey started over a decade ago when one of the first author’s students (Blandy Costello) walked into his office and shared her frustration over conflicting advice and directives from different doctoral committee members. That initial discussion highlighted the lack of consensus on best practices related to exploratory factor analysis, and ended with us deciding that there were empirical ways to explore best practices. After many simulations and further discussions, two articles were published related to these issues: Osborne & Costello (2004) and Costello & Osborne (2005). Both have received significant attention in the literature, and the latter has been cited about 3600 times as we write this. Obviously, we recognized ...