TUTORIAL: FACTOR ANALYSIS REVISITED – AN OVERVIEW WITH THE HELP OF SPSS, SAS AND R PACKAGES

Numerous research articles and books published on Factor Analysis as it is widely applied in many of the disciplines such as Psychology & behaviour sciences and marketing where more number of observed variables is used. Factor analysis is used to reduce the number of variables which are correlated among themselves by defining them into few factors which are linear combinations of the original variables and it also the studies the underlying structure in the data set. Factor analysis is introduced by Spearman a century ago. This paper provides an overview of Factor Analysis and how to conduct a Factor Analysis using SAS, SPSS and R statistical packages through a hypothetical data set.