The MR- and Other Criteria for Orthogonal Rotation of Factors

Several criteria for orthogonal factor rotation are presented and evaluated. They include one or an equally weighted combination of up to three computation rules. The computation rules are Carroll’s (1953) rule, the rule which is complementary to Carroll’s rule as well as a rule constructed according to the expert’s ability to select the most appropriate configuration of high loadings in considering the correlation matrix. Orthogonal rotation due to the various criteria which include these computation rules as well as Quartimax and Varimax were applied to simulated data and special correlation matrices which included 7, 9, 10 and 20 variables. The MR (multiple rules) criterion which includes all three computation rules led to the most promising results in small numbers of variables. If the data sets were composed of 20 variables, Varimax and the MR criterion led to similar results. The application of the MR criterion is recommended in small numbers of variables whenever “simple structure” is not obtainable by other rotation methods.