Is There a Ton of Exploratory Factor Analysis in Practice?

i would agree that there's not a ton exploratory about exploratory factor analysis in practice, except for the mathematics of what you're doing. We do have to identify how many factors we want to extract, so we can look at a one or two or three or four or five solution and compare and contrast those. Any solution is mathematically equivalent to any other solution,. which means we can rescale the factor loadings in ways that are useful to us. I don't know if you disagree on there's never a reason to go orthogona. Going orthogona means you're forcing the latent variables to be uncorrelated. Go an oblique rotation, and that allows the