About a week ago, I went through pointing and clicking your way to a factor analysis. At the time, I suggested rotating the factors. Now we’re going to interpret the rotated factor pattern. Let me recap, briefly. Agresti and Finlay (p.532) put it way better than me when they said: Factor analysis is a multivariate…
My doctoral advisor, the late, great Dr. Eyman, used to tell me that my psychometric theory lectures were, A light treatment of a very serious subject. Hmph. Well, with all due respect to a truly wonderful mentor, I still have to state unequivocally that the majority of students when looking at a factor analysis for…
So, yesterday, if you were paying attention, we figured out WHY to do a factor analysis today’s post is about how. I’m using SAS Enterprise Guide because I had it open on my computer. Here is what the completed project looks like: Here is what I did, reading from the top — I opened…
“The problem with women isn’t that they leave you, but that they have to tell you WHY.” Whether in teaching judo, statistics, programming or management, I’m a big fan of telling people why. As I said before, the first step in programming is to THINK. This applies to statistical programming as well, which is what…
Too often, when I look at the surveys some people design, I have the same thought as when I see my granddaughter with a lollipop bigger than her head – Just what exactly do you think that you are going to DO with that? The problem is that both may have metaphorically (or, in Eva’s…
The Mplus website has free videos on using Mplus. The introductory course (not very introductory, really, because the the main topics are advanced factor analysis and structural equation modeling) has some pretty good resources. While it is not professional quality – just a video of a class – and much of it is beyond the…
After dropping The Spoiled One off at the beach and setting a personal best for calls returned, I’m back on setting up data sets, assignments and more for the fall semester. So ….. I tried using the UPLOAD option from the menu in the SAS Web Editor and that was a sad failure. Next, I…
With three children under age six while I was writing my dissertation, I learned never to leave things until the last minute because that is EXACTLY when two of them would come down with the chicken pox. That’s why I’m working on assignments, lectures and videos for fall semester now. I was asked to teach…
It must be that time of year because I was asked to speak at two different schools in downtown Los Angeles this week, one elementary school and one middle school. The Perfect Jennifer probably won the coolest teacher award for getting her younger sister, a world champion in mixed martial arts and subject of a…
Last week I wrote a bit about how to get an exploratory factor analysis using Mplus. The question now, is what does that output MEAN ? First, you just get some information on the programming statements or defaults that produced your output: INPUT READING TERMINATED NORMALLY Exploratory Factor Analysis ; SUMMARY OF ANALYSIS Number of…