ABSTRACT
Introduction Although it is quite possible to perform exploratory factor analyses by hand, and older texts such as Cattell (1952) provide detailed instructions for doing so, such exercises are best suited to the enthusiast (or masochist) who has several weeks to spare. The calculations involved are lengthy and repetitious, so are best performed by computer. Most of the main statistical packages contain good exploratory factor analysis routines that run analyses in minutes rather than hours, the time taken to perform an analysis being roughly proportional to the cube of the number of variables. Confirmatory factor analyses (which will be described towards the end of this chapter) require specialized packages and analyses can sometimes take hours to run.
