Shall I remove factors because of low Cronbach alpha level?

I have two questions:

First, I am adapting a measurement instrument (scale) from English to Turkish. The original scale has six factors. The results of an exploratory factor analysis in SPSS, demonstrated that the adapted instrument consists of nine factors. I deleted one factor, because its items had similar loadings on different factors.

Can the adapted scale be used as an instrument measuring eight factors?

Secondly, an assessment of the internal consistency demonstrated a high Cronbach's $$\alpha$$ for the total scale, but a very low $$\alpha$$ for two factors i.e., .200 and .387.

Should these factors be removed from the instrument?

• A "scale" which is multi-factor in its structure should rather be called a "battery". Anyway, it may not be expected to be homogeneous, i.e. high alpha. Apr 3, 2014 at 21:51
• Actually PCA is a exploratory procedure, with not a great reliability when ratio N/i is small i.e. smaller than 10 (N: total respondents, i: total items in PCA procedure). Do you consider applying Confirmatory Factor Analysis instead? How many respondents do you have? If sample is large you may consider splitting the sample in two parts, apply PCA in first half and CFA in second according to the proposed model in original scale. Apr 4, 2014 at 5:52

There are several statistical packages that can be used for CFA, including Mplus,lavaan in R,AMOS, and LISREL.