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The inter-rater reliability of Cattell's scree and Linn's mean square ratio test of the number of factors was studied. Sample correlation matrices were generated from a population correlation matrix by means of standard Monte Carlo procedures such that there were 100 samples based on each of 3 sample sizes. Each matrix was factored and the scree test and the mean square ratio test were each applied by five raters. For both tests, the inter-rater reliabilities were very low. These results suggest that inexperienced factor analysts should be wary of these tests of the number of factors.
Crawford et al. (Mon,) studied this question.