A Review and Evaluation of Exploratory Factor Analysis Practices in Organizational Research

The authors surveyed exploratory factor analysis (EFA) practices in three organizational journals from 1985 to 1999 to investigate purposes for conducting EFA and to update and extend Ford, MacCallum, and Tait’s (1986) review. Ford et al. surveyed the same journals from 1975 to 1984, concluding that researchers often applied EFA poorly (e.g., relying too heavily on principal components analysis [PCA], eigenvalues greater than 1 to choose the number of factors, and orthogonal rotations). Fabrigar, Wegener, MacCallum, and Strahan (1999) reached a similar conclusion based on a much smaller sample of studies. This review of 371 studies shows reason for greater optimism. The tendency to use multiple…