ABSTRACT
The centroid method of factor extraction (Thurstone, 1947; Fruchter, 1954) was the best known and most widely used method of factor extraction before electronic high-speed computers became readily available. Most factor analytic studies published before 1960 used this method. As high-speed computing equipment has become more generally accessible, the centroid method has been supplanted gradually by more precise methods that would have been too laborious for application with a desk calculator. The most commonly used method today is the principal factor method, with communalities of less than 1.0, or the principal component method if the communalities are set to equal 1.0. The computational algorithms are the same for both of these methods.
