Dear Peter, thank you for you patient!
> In my earlier post, I noted > the difference between PCA and FA; it is not clear to me which you want. > In fact, it is not clear to me that you want either of these. I understand. I want to identify the "latent" relationship between my 36 variables. I guess I should use a "Principal axis factoring analysis" instead of PCA, right? > So, let's take a step back. > > You have ratings of bosses by a bunch of people on a bunch of > variables. What do you want to get out of this? (Not what statistics > do you want, but what do you want to discover? What are your hypotheses > (if any)? What have others found when doing similar studies? etc. I think you are perfectly right. I will try to explain as clearer as I can, my objectives. Just before going on, I want to make a precisation about the questionnaire I administered: it asked to respondents to "rate each item depending on how well it described their project leader on a 1 to 9 scale". Now I would like to know: 1) along which dimensions respondents describe their leaders (the relationship between variables). 2) how much the leaders they described score on the average in each dimension. As an example: the questionnaire I administered to them contained 3 items (among the 36) that factor analysis showed to correlate nicely. These items are: - he is competent - he is knowledgeable - he is experienced I concluded that these items represent one dimension I labeled "leader's competence". In addition (and this is my main problem, by now), I would like to calculate how much the leaders they described score e.g. on the "competence" dimension. Factor analysis told me that the three items listed above correlate nicely and thus form a factor. Now, how much the leaders have been described as "competent", by the respondents? Eventually, I would like to sort factors dependently on the mean score they got -- I would be able to say something like "the respondent's leaders have been described along these dimensions (e.g. - "leader's competence", "leader's friendliness" [...]) and among these dimensions items correlated to "leader's competence" got an average higher rating than those items correlated to "leader's competence". I hope I have been succesful explaining my objectives :) -Gian P.s. answers I got to my posts are helping a lot in my process of learning! . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
