Factor analysis is a useful tool for investigating variable relationships for complex concepts such as socioeconomic status, dietary patterns, or psychological scales.
It allows researchers to investigate concepts that are not easily measured directly by collapsing a large number of variables into a few interpretable underlying factors.
The key concept of factor analysis is that multiple observed variables have similar patterns of responses because they are all associated with a latent (i.e. not directly measured) variable.
For example, people may respond similarly to questions about income, education, and occupation, which are all associated with the latent variable socioeconomic status.
In every factor analysis, there are the same number of factors as there are variables. Each factor captures a certain amount of the overall variance in the observed variables, and the factors are always listed in order of how much variation they explain.
The eigenvalue is a measure of how much of the variance of the observed variables a factor explains. Any factor with an eigenvalue ≥1 explains more variance than a single observed variable.
So if the factor for socioeconomic status had an eigenvalue of 2.3 it would explain as much variance as 2.3 of the three variables. This factor, which captures most of the variance in those three variables, could then be used in other analyses.
The factors that explain the least amount of variance are generally discarded. Deciding how many factors are useful to retain will be the subject of another post.
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