Factor Analysis/Prinicpal Component Analysis: Reporting to APA Style

[AdamC]

Hello All,

Desperate for help!

I've performed a principal component analysis on a pilot study of a questionnaire I created. I have removed poor quality items (leaving me with 9, having started with 18).

I have 3 factors coming up, with eigenvalues greater than 1. I have a determinant of .003.

I have also run the KMO and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity.

Now I need to report all of this data, results of assumption tests, determinant, factors that were revealed etc in an APA styled document, and I cannot find anywhere how to do this.

I've been searching on the internet for over a day now, library, my book collection and I can't find anything.

If anyone could help me with this, I would be so grateful.

Many thanks,

Adam

[SmilingSara]

Hi Adam,
I don't think APA has requirements for reporting factor analysis or principal components analysis results; I think APA is more for the overall formatting (references, spacing, etc.) of the document itself.

Regarding what is a "good" way to report a principal components analysis, it really all depends on how much space you're given, right? But here are some things that are normally reported (and some of it is just a copying and pasting job from the software you use)...
* a correlation matrix of your data so that others can reproduce it if they want to
* a table showing a table showing the Eigenvalues of all the principal components
* a table for the Eigenvectors
* plus all of the other details you listed above (and don't forget to mention if you used any rotation method or not... if you did, you should include the output for the rotation as well)

Basically, try to find other articles in your field and see how they report things. It really varies.