Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is a statistical tool for digging out
hidden factors which give rise to the diversity of manifest objectives
in psychology, medicine and other sciences. EFA had its heyday as
psychologist Leon Thurstone (1935 and 1948) based EFA on what he called
the “principle of simple structure” (SS). This principle, however, was
erroneous from the beginning what remained unrecognized despite
subsequent inventions of more sophisticated statistical tools such as
confirmatory analysis and structural equation modeling. These methods
are highly recommended today as tolerable routes to model complexities
of observation. But they did not remove the harmful errors that SS had
left behind. Five chapters in this book demonstrate and explain the
trouble. In chapter 2 the ailment of SS is healed by introducing an
unconventional factor rotation, called Varimin. Varimin gives variables
of an analysis an optimal opportunity to manifest functional
interrelations underlying correlational observations. Ten applications
of Varimin (in chapter 2) show that its results are superior to results
obtained by the conventional Varimax procedure. Further applications are
presented for sports achievements (chapter 3), intelligence (chapter
4), and personality (chapter 5). If Varimin keeps on standing the tests
new theoretical building blocks will arise together with conceptual
networks promoting a better understanding of the domains under study.
Readers may check this prognosis by themselves using the statistical
tool (Varimin) which is provided by open access in the internet.