An Investigation of the Goodness of Fit of the Maximum Likelihood Estimation Procedure in Factor Analysis

Factor analysis is a frequently used model building technique, especially in sciences where a large number of variables need to be studied. Unfortunately, little work has been done on ways of testing the goodness of fit of the model to the data. Several techniques for testing this goodness of fit have been evaluated in this investigation. In addition, these techniques were used to evaluate the maximum likelihood estimation procedure as a factor analytic method.