A Review of CEFA Software: Comprehensive Exploratory Factor Analysis Program

CEFA 3.02( Browne, Cudeck, Tateneni, & Mels, 2008 ) is a factor analysis computer program designed to perform exploratory factor analysis. It provides the main properties that are needed for exploratory factor analysis, namely a variety of factoring methods employing eight different discrepancy functions to be minimized to yield initial solutions, a variety of tests or fit indices for the factor solutions, a reasonable choice of rotation methods to yield derived solutions, and asymptotic standard errors for the loadings of rotated factor pattern matrices. It is distributed free in an English version. The functionality of CEFA was reviewed and compared with the factor analysis procedures provided in widely used statistical packages, SAS (SAS Institute Inc., 1999) and SPSS (SPSS Inc., 2006).