The requirement for this lesson’s assignment is to conduct PCA. ThisPCA will tell you whether or not an EFA is needed in order to explorelatent factors within your items.
Use the following scenario as a reference when completing this week’sassignment.
Scenario: The University of Sussex constantly seeks to employ the bestpeople as lecturers. The University wanted to revise the Teaching ofStatistics for Scientific Experiments (TOSSE) questionnaire, which isbased on Bland’s (1977) theory that says that good research methodslecturers should have:
● A profound love of statistics● An enthusiasm for experimental design● A love of teaching● A complete absence of normal interpersonal skills.
These characteristics should be related (i.e., correlated). The Universityof Sussex revised this questionnaire to become the “Teaching ofStatistics for Scientific Experiments – Revised” (TOSSE–R), as shown inFigure 3. NCU further modified this humorous tool for use in this week.
Figure 3
TOSSE-R Questionnaire (modified from Bland, 1977)
They gave this questionnaire to 239 research methods lecturers aroundthe world to determine if it supported Bland’s (1977) theory. The data arein TOSSE-R.sav file. Address the following questions:
1. Based on the readings and this week’s lesson, what is the mainpurpose of factor analysis? What is the main purpose of a PrincipalComponent Analysis?
2. What is the difference between PCA, EFA, and CFA?
3. What is the appropriate value for a factor loading according to thereadings?
4. Conduct a PCA and interpret the factor structure.
5. Present the results of the PCA, including a discussion of whether youthink an EFA would be needed based on the results of the PCA and why.
6. How many factors were extracted from the questionnaire?
Length: Complete responses to all six questions and prompts. Pleaseinclude the question prompts along with your responses in yourassignment submission. In addition to a WORD (.doc) file with theanswers to the assignment questions, also include the output (.spv) file.
NOTE: SPSS automatically generates the .spv file as you work in SPSS.When you close your SPSS main window, SPSS will ask you if you wantto save the output file. Click ‘yes’, then save to your computer andupload with your assignment.
NOTE: In SPSS, you must be careful when running an EFA because thedefault is set to PCA; in the menu “Analyze” “Dimension reduction”“Factor” and then in the box labeled “Factor Analysis: Extraction” you willsee “Method” and the default is already set to “principal component.”Principal component is the PCA, so if you leave this, you will beconducting a PCA.
References: No references are required, though any sources used otherthan those provided within the assignment should be cited andreferenced in APA format
