I’ve run a pilot study with only 50 participants and I was wondering what I could actually do with a small sample like that, how can I best use this data before collecting the final sample of 600 participants. I will be doing an exploratory analysis and a confirmatory analysis. The goal is to validate a novel construct that is supposed to include 4 different sub-factors. I did the EFA with the pilot study and it seems that the 4 factors formed a unique factor.
Are these preliminary results reliable, considering the small sample size? What else I could do?