Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis: Understanding concepts and applications.

Provides a concise (162 pages of text) and basic overview of two disciplines of assessing structure: exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). As Thompson explains, the book was written ‘‘to strike a happy medium between accuracy and completeness versus over-whelming technical complexity’ ’ (p. ix). Example data sets are used throughout the book to dem-onstrate important concepts. It must be noted, however, that this is not a cookbook that presents analysis steps along with software syntax and output. Instead, the focus is on the explanation of concepts and the logic of EFA and CFA. As the title implies, there is coverage of both EFA and CFA, but the majority of the book is…