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Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Understanding concepts and applications By Bruce Thompson Washington DC: APA. Cased ISBN 1-59147-093-5, £39.50.
As the title suggests, this book provides a unified approach to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. A combined treatment of both these methods in a single text is unusual, but has clear advantages in drawing out the similarities in the two approaches as well as emphasizing their differences.
After a very brief introductory chapter, Chapters 2-6 cover all the basic concepts and methods of EFA. Explanations are clear throughout and the decision sequence for a factor analysis (method, number of factors, rotation, calculating scores) is carefully explained. The discussion of principal components vs. factor analysis proper (which gets its own chapter) is particularly clear, and includes some interesting issues which are often not mentioned in more elementary texts. There is also a clearer coverage than usual of sources of error in factor analysis, with sampling as well as measurement error being discussed. The emphasis on...