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I was hoping you could help with this question. I have a survey, a 30-item instrument. I've got 18 responses back from this.

I also have a paper in which they've done a principal axis factor analysis on, together with the item loadings (4 factors).

Is it possible for me to convert the scores that I have, and reduce them into these four factors based on the published paper loadings?

Many thanks

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Are the data sets the same? I don't think this would make sense if you are dealing with different data from possibly different populations. – Michael Chernick Jul 21 '12 at 14:17
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A bundle of questions to you. 1) Is your task this one: Somebody's done FA on large sample and published loadings. You have 18 more cases and wish to compute factor scores for these. 2) By "scores" in the last paragraph you mean 18x30 data values, don't you? 3) Do you have the original large sample at hand? 4) Did they publish (a) means and st. deviations of their 30-item data; (b) factor score regression coefficient matrix? 4) What does PCA tag do here? - PCA is not quite identical to principal axis factoring. – ttnphns Jul 21 '12 at 14:22
P.S. Maybe they published their 30x30 correlation matrix? – ttnphns Jul 21 '12 at 14:32
@DanielStark - Should the first sentence of the second paragraph read "factor analysis on a larger sample who filled in the same survey"? I'm presuming so as otherwise I don't see how the question (or indeed that sentence) makes sense, but I didn't make the edit in case I'd misunderstood. – Peter Ellis Jul 21 '12 at 21:18

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