This article is basically ripped off from Field’s Discovering Statistics Using SPSS for Windows with some minor subjective interpretation from me. So if you have access to the book just read it instead of this article. It is really a good book for you who want to learn SPSS and statistics. Highly recommended book
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Factor analysis was first used in 1904 by Charles Spearman, a Psychologist from United Kingdom. Spearman used factor analysis in his models of human intelligence. With factor analysis he developed theory that variety of cognitive test could all be explained by one single factor which called g factor. Later on Raymond Cattell, psychologist from US, used factor analysis in most of his research on intelligence which lead to the development of his theory on Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence. 16 Personality Factor (16PF) test is also one of Raymond Cattell’s research results based on factor analysis.
…factor analysis is used to study the patterns of relationship among many dependent variables, with the goal of discovering something about the nature of independent variables that affect them. Factor analysis is quiet different to other statistical analysis method. Many statistical analysis methods are used to investigate the relation between independent and dependent variables. In contrast, factor analysis is used to study the patterns of relationship among many dependent variables, with the goal of discovering something about the nature of independent variables that affect them. The tricky part is that those independent variables were not measure directly. Thus answers obtained by factor analysis are necessarily more hypothetical and tentative than is true when independent variables are observed directly (Darlington, 1997).
Factor analysis in psychology is most often associated with intelligence research. Nevertheless, the use of factor analysis can be observed in other domain of psychology such as personality, attitudes, etc. The trait theorists in psychology have been used factor analysis to measure personality traits. The Extraversion- Introversion and the Neuroticism traits by Eysenck and 16 Personality Factor questionnaires (16 PF) by Cattell are some of the examples of implementation of Factor Analysis (Field, 2000). Furthermore, factor analysis is used widely in other social sciences, education, business fields, biological science, etc.
The main applications of factor analytic techniques are: (1) to reduce the number of variables and (2) to detect structure in the relationships between variables, that is to classify variables. Therefore, factor analysis is applied as a data reduction or structure detection method (Statsoft, 2003). Reducing the number of variables means reducing complexity of data, thus it will be easier to analyze the data…
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