Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Exploratory Factor Analysis
Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis are employed to understand shared variance of measured variables that is believed to be attributable to a factor or latent construct. Despite this similarity, however, EFA and CFA are conceptually and statistically distinct analyses.
The goal of EFA is to identify factors based on data and to maximize the amount of variance explained. The researcher is not required to have any specific hypotheses about how many factors will emerge, and what items or variables these factors will comprise. If these hypotheses exist, they are not incorporated into and do not affect the results of the statistical analyses. By contrast, CFA evaluates a priori hypotheses and is largely driven by theory. CFA analyses require the researcher to hypothesize, in advance, the number of factors, whether or not these factors are correlated, and which items/measures load onto and reflect which factors. As such, in contrast to exploratory factor analysis, where all loadings are free to vary, CFA allows for the explicit constraint of certain loadings to be zero.
EFA is sometimes reported in research when CFA would be a better statistical approach. It has been argued that CFA can be restrictive and inappropriate when used in an exploratory fashion. However, the idea that CFA is solely a “confirmatory” analysis may sometimes be misleading, as modification indices used in CFA are somewhat exploratory in nature. Modification indices show the improvement in model fit if a particular coefficient were to become unconstrained. Likewise, EFA and CFA do not have to be mutually exclusive analyses; EFA has been argued to be a reasonable follow up to a poor-fitting CFA model.
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