Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

What Is a Higher-Order Factor?

Whenever factors are correlated, there is, naturally, a question as to whether there truly are several independent factors or whether there is a single “higher-order” factor.[1] This has been a point of discussion for many decades, and is often conceptually and theoretically important. For example, is self-concept a single thing, or several separate things? Is depression a single construct composed of several subconstructs, or is it really not a coherent construct?

Scholars writing in this area since the early 20th century have argued that when initial factor analyses (we can refer to these as “first-order” factors as they come from the first level of analysis) produce correlated factors, researchers should explore ...