There is no place in this book to describe or explain factor analysis in any detail, and it is improbable that anyone without at least a basic understanding of the technique will use our material. However all the studies in this work rely heavily on factor analysis in several ways, so it was thought useful to provide some notes on the detailed conventions we have adopted. The general considerations leading to the adoption of factor analysis for our research are briefly reviewed in Chapters 2 and 3 (Sections 2.8 and 3.4)

Because of the crucial need for comparability between the various country analyses, the Research Group spent a good deal of time at an early stage standardizing procedures, and deriving common solutions to the common problems faced. Consequently there is no reason to doubt the inter-comparability of the technical results in different chapters – though this does not, of course, extend to guaranteeing substantive comparability. Technical uniformity is further aided by the fact that, as the SPSS package of programmes is now almost universally available, it was possible to insist that the same programme should be used by all analysts. As a result we were able to operationalize our common decisions very precisely, to the point of specifying which options were to be selected on procedure cards inside the SPSS Factor Analysis program. In many cases the analyses were carried out entirely at the University of Essex by Hearl.