Testing the Null Hypothesis for Rotation to a Target

This study proposes and illustrates a method for estimating the degree to which a factor rotation to an hypothesized target represents an improvement over rotation to a random target. The original hypothesized target matrix is transformed so that the direction of targeted salients is randomly determined with the restriction that the new target is orthogonal to the original. When applied to a factor matrix of content and response style measures, the hypothesized target yielded a decidedly better fit to the data than did the random target.