Customer Reviews

Introduction to Factor Analysis: What It Is and How To Do It (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences)

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I am usually a big fan of the small green series of math books. This is the fourth one I have studied. Thanks to these books I successfully learned on my own Logit Regression, Cluster Analysis, and Discriminant Analysis. Now how about Factor Analysis? Well, it is the exception that confirms the rule.

Relative to the other books I have just mentioned, I found this one really poor. The authors spent just four short pages at the beginning of the book on introducing in (not so) plain English what Factor Analysis is. The problem is that their explanations are so poor, you really don't have a realistic clue of what it is. The authors then launch into an intense core mathematical section underlying the foundation of Factor Analysis. I found it byzantine at best. I attempted to replicate their calculations to develop an understanding of what they were doing. Doing so, I even found a mistake. More often then not, they did not flesh out a clear example of the calculations. So, you are left interpreting their formulas, and often not readily getting the same results they get. As indicated, once I clearly confirmed that our difference was due to a mistake. The rest of the time, I had no idea. Just applying their formulas did not seem to always work. In math, that is unsettling. Being able to replicate the answer 80% of the time does not cut it.

Also, the sequence of the material is sometimes awkward. On one page, you often have a table about one Factor model, but a diagram about a previous Factor model. So, the presentation of the material is confusing.

Eventually, I studied Factor Analysis from other sources (internet and textbooks on multivariate analysis). By now, I developed a fair understanding of it. Based on my experience, there are ways to teach Factor Analysis in a clear and understandable way. And, these two authors did not achieve this. Thus, you figure why I can't recommend this book.

This is an easy to read, gentle introduction to factor analysis. If you have struggled to find a readable resource on factor analysis then stop your search! I finished this book in an afternoon. I finally understand the basics of factor analysis. It's actually quite simple! You don't need more than an elementary understanding of expectation, variance, covariance and correlation.

The following adjectives describe this paper:

Well-written, Clear, Concise, Easy to understand, Non-mathematical (Basic statistics), Complete, Excellent diagrams

Do not hesitate to get this book!

I give it my highest recommendation!

The introduction gives you some formulas that are not self-illustrative. The author fails to extract insights from it. Either you really do the math, or you will find it useless. Later the book improves a little but still is very superficial, doing references to the companion paper (another book of the same series) a lot of times. I recommend only as a very brief intro to the topic, and I also suggest one to do the math!