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Hello and thanks in advance for your help!

I have conducted and EFA for a scale I made that includes 13 items. Of these items, 2 are recoded. Looking at the rotated component matrix I see that this scale has 2 factors, one with 11 items and one with the 2 recoded items. What does this mean and how do I decribe this? Does anyone know of a journal article or citation that deals with this sort of issue.

Noah41
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    Can you state what you mean by "recoded". EG, if it were just *reverse scored*, it would still load on the same factor, but the sign of the loading would flip. It may be just a coincidence that the only 2 recoded items are different. – gung - Reinstate Monica Dec 05 '12 at 13:53
  • Yes, reverse scored and I know that it shouldn't matter but could it just be a coincidence that they happen to be reverse scored and are another factor? – Noah41 Dec 05 '12 at 13:55

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As noted in gung's comment, mathematically speaking reverse scoring does not make any difference and it might very well be a coincidence that the recoded items end up together.

It is however also conceivable that a tendency to agree with all items independently of their content (“acquiescence bias”) would attenuate the correlations between positively and negatively worded items and consequently lead to the presence of a spurious factor.

I haven't read it but this paper might be relevant to your situation: Schmitt, N. & Stults, D.M. (1985). Factors defined by negatively keyed items: The result of careless respondents? Applied Psychological Measurement, 9, 367-373.

Gala
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  • Excellent points! Also, @Noah41 - since you say you obtained a "rotated component matrix," I'm betting you used principal components analysis when exploratory factor analysis proper would have been much better. A very common mistake. See http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/1576/what-are-the-differences-between-factor-analysis-and-principal-component-analysi – rolando2 Jan 05 '13 at 15:36