Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis: Understanding concepts and applications.
Bruce Thompson · American Psychological Association eBooks · 2004
provides a concise (162 pages of text) and basic overview of two disciplines of assessing structure: exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). As Thompson explains, the book was written ‘‘to strike a happy medium between accuracy and completeness versus over-whelming technical complexity’ ’ (p. ix). Example data sets are used throughout the book to dem-onstrate important concepts. It must be noted, however, that this is not a cookbook that presents analysis steps along with software syntax and output. Instead, the focus is on the explanation of concepts and the logic of EFA and CFA. As the title implies, there is coverage of both EFA and CFA, but the majority of the book is ded-icated to exploratory procedures. In addition, much of the discussion and demonstration of EFA focuses on the use of principal components (PC) analysis, which could be disappointing for those wanting a more detailed discussion of principal axis factor analysis (PAF). The book consists of 12 chapters. Chapter 1 provides a very brief introduction to both EFA and CFA. The purposes of factor-analytic methods are succinctly presented, and the importance of theory when employing CFA is emphasized. Chapter 2 introduces the basics of matrix algebra, major EFA concepts (e.g., pattern coeffi-