ABSTRACT
There are volumes of advice on how to conduct an exploratory factor analysis and there are also structural equation programs that can do confirmatory factor analysis as well. Factor analysis in the context of mixed methods research is a technique for creating a smaller number of factors out of a large corpus of text units. The term factor analysis topic modelling is used rather than factor analysis. Just as in traditional exploratory factor analysis, the researcher names factors from the statistical patterns of loadings extracted from the data. Just like traditional exploratory factor analysis, the examination of the results might lead one to combine factors, remove artefactual factors, exclude more words, and possibly rerun the analysis with a leaner data set. Onwuegbuzie and Combs discuss factor analysis of text data as a “crossover” strategy wherein data that are typically analyzed through qualitative methods are examined quantitatively.
