Factor analysis of EBI items: Tutorial with RStudio and EFA.dimensions package
For this posting, I will be walking you through an example of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using RStudio with the EFA.dimensions package. In this tutorial, I will address various steps one typically considers when performing EFA and how to make decisions at various stages in the process. We will be factor analyzing items from the Epistemic Belief Inventory (EBI; Schraw et al., 2002) based on data collected from Chilean high school students in this study . Download a copy of the Excel file containing the data here . The items for our analyses all have the root name 'ce' (see screenshot below). Although the original authors of the study analyzed all 28 items, to keep our output simpler, we will only perform the analysis on the 17 items contained in Table 2. These items correspond to the following variables in the Excel data file: ce1, ce2, ce3, ce4, ce5, ce8, ce9, ce11, ce14, ce15, ce17, ce20, ce22, ce24-ce27. Below is a screenshot of a subset of the Excel file. Video w