Factor analysis had its beginnings early in the Twentieth Century in the research and writings of Charles Spearman and Louis Leon Thurstone. Today, in addition to its use in the social sciences, factor analysis is widely applied to research in marketing, product management, operations research, and other applied sciences that deal with large quantities of data. Since the advent of satellites and space exploration, factor analytic techniques have been found to be useful in radiometry for the extraction of signal from noise.

My interest in factor analysis was awakened by my study of Raymond B. Cattell's Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF) inventory. For more than twenty years, I collected 16PF data at my institution from students in the teacher education program. When I did a principal components factor analysis of their raw scores, five factors emerged, not 16, corresponding to the Big Five dimensions of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).

The methods I used to perform my principal components factor analysis are described in this textbook.

FORTRAN program listings for the various methods of factor analysis presented in this textbook can be found in the appendix. ( )