Factor analysis of the 24 items instrument
In the next stage of the development, i.e. the third empirical step, a
factor analysis was performed in order to reduce the number of items.
A principal component analysis with varimax rotation and Kaiser
Normalisation was used on data from a study group of 326
conveniently chosen students at the same university college in
southern Norway who followed a study programme for becoming a
registered nurse or a teacher. The female students were 24.2 years of
age and the male students (8%) were 26.8 years. Although the items in
the scale are on an ordinal scale level, the instrument was treated as
an interval scale in this procedure, since this fact does not have much
influence on the correlations between items, which are the basic input
to factor analysis (Kim and Mueller, 1978; Pett et al., 2003). The
Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was 0.65, and the
Bartlett's test showed pb0.001, indicating that there was an adequate
sample and a sufficient minimum sample size for performing a factor
analysis (Pett et al., 2003). A nine factor solution explained 57.9% of
the total variances. Item 12 (Each individual is his/her own highest
moral judge) did not load with a factor loading ≥0.400 on any of the
factors and was therefore deleted.