Exploratory Factor Analysis - The Good and the Ugly

E f a is a mathematically principled method of dimension reduction that allows us to go from a large amount of information to a smaller amount of information. The bad is, the process that i just described can be deeply affected by idiosyncratic characteristics of the sample which may not general lis beyond what we studied in our own data file. There's a huge potential for misuse of this in practice, not necessarily malicious but there are a lot of subjective criteria that are invoked in everything that we've talked about. So i think the ugly is there's a degree of subjectivity that we can unintentionally use in a self confirming way that maybe would not be done if a more objective analysis was conducted.