Scale Construction on the Basis of Components Analysis: A Comparison of Three Strategies

Cattell suggested constructing scales on the basis of components analysis by assigning weights 1 to variables with high positive loadings on the components and -1 to variables with high negative loadings on the components. This strategy is compared with other strategies of scale construction, which assign weights 1 or -1 to variables with high weights for the components. The latter strategies appear to yield scales which have higher correlations with the corresponding component scores and lower correlations among them, but also are less homogeneous then scales constructed by the former strategy. It is concluded that the former strategy, which is very popular among practitioners, can continue to be used if homogeneity of scales is preferred to orthogonality of scales.