| The purpose of this article was to introduce the basic concepts, calculation methods, two examples related to the exploratory factor analysis, and how to implement calculations using SAS. Basic concepts included common factors and special factors, factor loadings, common factor variances, and factor scree plots; the calculation methods involved the mathematical model of factor analysis, principal component method, principal factor method, centroid method and maximum likelihood method; the data in the two examples were “evaluation data of 31 provincial government portal websites” and “sources of basic construction investment in various regions across the country”; with the help of SAS software, the exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the data in the two examples, and an explanation was given to the SAS output results. |