Posted: March 11th, 2023

Week 06

The requirement for this lesson’s assignment is to conduct PCA. This
PCA will tell you whether or not an EFA is needed in order to explore
latent factors within your items.

Use the following scenario as a reference when completing this week’s
assignment.

Scenario: The University of Sussex constantly seeks to employ the best
people as lecturers. The University wanted to revise the Teaching of
Statistics for Scientific Experiments (TOSSE) questionnaire, which is
based on Bland’s (1977) theory that says that good research methods
lecturers should have:

● A profound love of statistics
● An enthusiasm for experimental design
● A love of teaching
● A complete absence of normal interpersonal skills.

These characteristics should be related (i.e., correlated). The University
of Sussex revised this questionnaire to become the “Teaching of
Statistics for Scientific Experiments – Revised” (TOSSE–R), as shown in
Figure 3. NCU further modified this humorous tool for use in this week.

Figure 3

TOSSE-R Questionnaire (modified from Bland, 1977)

They gave this questionnaire to 239 research methods lecturers around
the world to determine if it supported Bland’s (1977) theory. The data are
in TOSSE-R.sav file. Address the following questions:

1. Based on the readings and this week’s lesson, what is the main
purpose of factor analysis? What is the main purpose of a Principal
Component Analysis?

2. What is the difference between PCA, EFA, and CFA?

3. What is the appropriate value for a factor loading according to the
readings?

4. Conduct a PCA and interpret the factor structure.

5. Present the results of the PCA, including a discussion of whether you
think an EFA would be needed based on the results of the PCA and why.

6. How many factors were extracted from the questionnaire?

Length: Complete responses to all six questions and prompts. Please
include the question prompts along with your responses in your
assignment submission. In addition to a WORD ( ) file with the
answers to the assignment questions, also include the output (.spv) file.

NOTE: SPSS automatically generates the .spv file as you work in SPSS.
When you close your SPSS main window, SPSS will ask you if you want
to save the output file. Click ‘yes’, then save to your computer and
upload with your assignment.

NOTE: In SPSS, you must be careful when running an EFA because the
default is set to PCA; in the menu “Analyze” “Dimension reduction”
“Factor” and then in the box labeled “Factor Analysis: Extraction” you will
see “Method” and the default is already set to “principal component.”
Principal component is the PCA, so if you leave this, you will be
conducting a PCA.

References: No references are required, though any sources used other
than those provided within the assignment should be cited and
referenced in APA format