We applied principal components factor analysis to the 48 travel motive items
because we wanted to identify groups of motives that would reveal the types of
factors identified by Beard and Ragheb (1983), thereby confirming the meaningfulness
of our travel motive data from baby boomers. Also, this data reduction
technique would allow us to use a more parsimonious set of motive factor
scores—rather than the more numerous original variables—in the analyses that
followed. The overriding objective was interpretability of the resulting varimaxrotated
factor matrix (in light of Beard and Ragheb’s findings)—not maximum
explained variance or the inclusion of all factors with eigenvalues of 1.0 or higher.