Exploratory Factor Analysis: Validating Measurement

Prior to EFA, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) was calculated to ensure that the sample size was adequate. KMO shows values between 0 and 0.49 as unacceptable, 0.5–0.7 as mediate; 0.7–0.8 as good, 0.8–0.9 as great, and > 0.9 as excellent [31 (link)]. EFA was performed using the principal component analysis with varimax solution [32 (link)]. Since we could not find a clear relationship between the items in the questions and the construct to be measured, we needed an exploratory factor analysis. In other words, we were not sure which items measured which structures. Therefore, because of this suspicion, we used exploratory factor analysis [33 ]. To select the factors, an eigenvalue greater than 1 and a factor loading equal to or greater than 0.4 were used. All the statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 21 statistical software package.