Intelligence

Abstract

Oblique target rotation in the context of exploratory factor analysis is a relevant method for the investigation of the oblique independent clusters model. It was argued that minimizing single cross-loadings by means of target rotation may lead to effects of sampling error of the intercorrelations of the target rotated factors. It was therefore proposed to compute the mean crossloadings for each block of salient loadings in the independent clusters model and to perform target rotation in order to minimize the block-wise mean cross-loadings. A simulation study based on correlated independent factor models revealed that mean oblique target rotation resulted in a smaller negative bias of the factor inter-correlations than conventional target rotation. Therefore, this method can be recommended when target rotation is performed in the context of oblique independent factor models. An R-script and an SPSS-script for this form of target rotation are provided in the Appendix.