A Case for Psychology: Factoring and Clustering Personality Dimensions

Abstract

This chapter covers how to analyze the underlying patterns in human behavior by carrying out exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis. To begin, you’ll learn about the big five personality dimensions. Following that, you’ll explore an approach for collecting data by retaining a Likert scale and measuring the reliability of the scale with Cronbach’s reliability testing strategy. Subsequently, you’ll perform factor analysis beginning with estimating Bartlett Sphericity statistics and then the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin statistic. Following that, you’ll rotate the eigenvalues by carrying out the varimax rotation method and estimate the proportional variances and cumulative variances. In addition, you’ll execute the K-Means method to observe clusters in the data beginning with standardizing the data and carrying out principal component analysis.