Steps to conducting FA
- When creating a questionnaire, often you may want to include a number of attitudinal questions around certain issues.
- When analyzing the data with all these variables you start by selecting those attitudes that you think describe some overall category, for example Taste in music.
- These attitudinal variables ideally should be of the same metric (e.g. , 1,2,3,4,5). Some say the variables should have 7 values, but 5 works fine. Don’t use dichotomous variables.
- Begin by computing a correlation matrix of all the variables in question. There should be some significant correlations, both positive and negative.
- There should be a 4:1 ratio of cases to variables (e.g. , 100 cases for 25 variables minimum) and sample size of at least 50.