Determining Sample Size Requirements in EFA Solutions: A Simple Empirical Proposal

In unrestricted or exploratory factor analysis (EFA), there is a wide range of recommendations about the size samples should be to attain correct and stable solutions. In general, however, these recommendations are either rules of thumb or based on simulation results. As it is hard to establish the extent to which a particular data set suits the conditions used in a simulation study, the advice produced by simulation studies is not direct enough to be of practical use. Instead of trying to provide general and complex recommendations, in this article, we propose to estimate the sample size that is needed to analyze a data set at hand. The estimation takes into account the specified EFA model. The proposal is based on an intensive simulation process in which the sample correlation matrix is used as a basis for generating data sets from a pseudo-population in which the parent correlation holds exactly, and the criterion for determining the size required is a threshold that quantifies the closeness between the pseudo-population and the sample reproduced correlation matrices. The simulation results suggest that the proposal works well and that the determinants identified agree with those in the literature.