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A Comparison of Factor Analytic Techniques

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Michael W. Browne*
Affiliation:
National Institute for Personnel Research, South Africa

Abstract

Statistical properties of several methods for obtaining estimates of factor loadings and procedures for estimating the number of factors are compared by means of random sampling experiments. The effect of increasing the ratio of the number of observed variables to the number of factors, and of increasing sample size, is examined. A description is given of a procedure which makes use of the Bartlett decomposition of a Wishart matrix to generate random correlation matrices.

Type
Original Paper
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 The Psychometric Society

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