Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 630

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 69 of the 69 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Using Factor Analysis to Gather Validity Evidence When Using Surveys in Your Research

Open access
Knekta, Eva, Runyon, Christopher, Eddy, Sarah·2019·CBE—Life Sciences Education
DOI 10.1187/cbe.18-04-0064
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Across all sciences, the quality of measurements is important. Survey measurements are only appropriate for use when researchers have validity evidence within their particular context. Yet, this step is frequently skipped or is not reported in educational research. This article briefly reviews the aspects of validity that researchers should consider when using surveys. It then focuses on factor analysis, a statistical method that can be used to collect an important type of validity evidence. Factor analysis helps researchers explore or confirm the relationships between survey items and identify the total number of dimensions represented on the survey. The essential steps to conduct and interpret a factor analysis are described. This use of factor analysis is illustrated throughout by a validation of Diekman and colleagues’ goal endorsement instrument for use with first-year undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students. We provide example data, annotated code, and output for analyses in R, an open-source programming language and software environment for statistical computing. For education researchers using surveys, understanding the theoretical and statistical underpinnings of survey validity is fundamental for implementing rigorous education research.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1187/cbe.18-04-0064

Cites

69 of 69 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 69 references

Cited by

See all 630

Metadata

Authors
Knekta, E., Runyon, C., & Eddy, S.
Venue
CBE—Life Sciences Education
Publisher
American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB)
Published
2019-03
Volume
18
Issue
1
Pages
rm1
ISSN
1931-7913 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1187/cbe.18-04-0064
OpenAlex
W2919301453
Cited by
630
References
69
FWCI
35.06
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
diamond

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Using Factor Analysis to Gather Validity Evidence When Using Surveys in Your Research. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1187/cbe.18-04-0064
The paper
Knekta, E., Runyon, C., & Eddy, S. (2019). One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Using Factor Analysis to Gather Validity Evidence When Using Surveys in Your Research. CBE—Life Sciences Education. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-04-0064

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.