Which statement describes quartimax rotation?

Which statement describes quartimax rotation?

• A. It attempts to maximize the spread of factor loadings for a variable across all factors.
• B. It minimizes cross-loadings on all factors.
• C. It rotates factors to be correlated.
• D. It estimates the number of factors by parallel analysis.

Answer: (A)

Quartimax rotation focuses on simplifying the variables themselves after factor extraction. It does this by maximizing the variance of the squared loadings for each variable across the factors, which tends to push a given variable to load highly on one factor while showing small loadings on the others. In practical terms, each variable ends up being associated mainly with a single factor, making the interpretation of variables clearer. This is different from options that describe reducing cross-loadings on all factors (which is more characteristic of varimax), or rotating factors to be correlated (which is an oblique rotation), or using parallel analysis to decide how many factors to retain (not a rotation at all).

Quartimax rotation focuses on simplifying the variables themselves after factor extraction. It does this by maximizing the variance of the squared loadings for each variable across the factors, which tends to push a given variable to load highly on one factor while showing small loadings on the others. In practical terms, each variable ends up being associated mainly with a single factor, making the interpretation of variables clearer.

This is different from options that describe reducing cross-loadings on all factors (which is more characteristic of varimax), or rotating factors to be correlated (which is an oblique rotation), or using parallel analysis to decide how many factors to retain (not a rotation at all).