ABSTRACT

Up to this point, we have generally concerned our analyses with procedures that have as the goal the examination of one or more a priori outcomes. With this chapter, we begin to deviate from this method of examination in that we are now doing just as the name of this procedure implies-exploring the data. Actually, some would say it is not even that but rather “it is reconnaissance” (Kaiser, 1970, p. 402). Rather than having one or more a priori outcomes, we are using exploratory factor analysis to reduce a large number of variables into identifiable clusters of variables to better understand the structure of the data.