Evaluation of usage and the presentation of the results of factorial analysis and analyses of principal components in education

This paper presents an evaluation of the use and presentation of results of factor analysis and principal component analysis as published between 1995 and 2005 in six Canadian educational periodicals. From a corpus of 1089 articles, the authors noted 61 uses of these analyses. Using a reading grid, they noted information on the objective of the analysis, the sample size, the variables, the extraction method, the dimensionality criteria, the method for axes rotation, and the results presented. They identified deficiencies both at the level of practices and in the result presentation. Finally, the authors formulate several recommendations regarding a more rigorous use of these types of analyses.