Semajno Naŭ (9)

Hello again fascinated - and fascinating - psychology readers! This week I did quite a few statistical analysis tests in order to derive some meaning from all the numbers.

At first, I did a factor analysis on the items of conformity and derived factors that had statistical significance present in the study.

In statistics, underlying correlations between certain items that have a role in the data are called factors. For example, factor one for conformity might indicate being persuaded by others while factor two is the desire to match one's standards to others. All of these factors are a specific indication of something greater happening "behind the scenes" of the numbers and reflect some aspect of conformity.

Here is a picture of the factor rotation that I did when I was looking into potential factors that existed.

This indicates that there are only three factors with an Eigenvalue greater than one. As a result, I checked the component matrix to see which items were associated most strongly with factors 1, 2, and 3.

After that, I did item analyses to see which items correlated most strongly within the factors. In statistics, items are the formal definition of the questions/statements that are answered in the survey by the participants.

The most exciting outcome of these tests was that I was able to narrow down the original 8-item scale to a 4-item scale with two distinct factors that controlled for over 64% of the total variance! Sweet!

The important thing to note is that actually performing a statistical test is simple as the program computes the numbers for you. However, the challenging part is when you attempt to assess all the components of your study and figure out how you are to approach it statistically. Essentially, statistics is easy to do once you know what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Finally, I wanted to see how conformity related to everything else so I did correlation analyses between the factors and all the other variables. This meant having TONS of correlation tests between the conformity factors and each of the other variables (there about 12 sets of variables).

There is much to describe here but its more technical and numerical than what can easily be understood. But I promise it will all be incorporated in my final research paper.

As always, stay motivated and see you next time!