ABSTRACT
Research projects sometimes include data reduction or simplification in their objectives. In such cases, one use statistical techniques that do not designate variables as either dependent or independent. They analyze only the dependent variables or only the independent variables. The two techniques appropriate in these situations are factor analysis and cluster analysis. Factor analysis is a multivariate statistical technique that can summarize the information from a large number of variables into a smaller number of variables or factors. Cluster analysis enables one to combine objects into groups so that objects in each of the groups are similar to one another and different from objects in all other groups. Factor analysis and cluster analysis are interdependence techniques. The business research dashboard tells people how these and other multivariate statistical techniques are being used by many organizations to improve their decision making. Researchers use exploratory factor analysis in an attempt to summarize the information in many variables using only a few factors.
