Three-Mode Common Factor Analysis: Procedure And Computer Programs

As psychologists increasingly recognize the limitations of single-occasion, single-measure research designs and employ more elaborate and comprehensive data collection schemes, sophisticated analytic techniques will play an ever more important role in understanding behavioral data. This paper outlines one such promising technique, Tucker's three-mode factor analysis, which enables the researcher to explore new taxonomic structures in three-way designs. The procedure is described in step-by-step format, which should be easy to follow for anyone familiar with traditional two-mode factor analysis. Appropriate computer programs are available to interface with the widely used SPSS package to calculate Tucker's common factor model.