Solved – How to calculate Mahalanobis distance in SPSS for an exploratory factor analysis

distancefactor analysisspss

I have a question regarding data screening for an exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

I am conducting an EFA to identify the factor structure of 20 questions that I created on the topic of spirituality. I want to identify outliers in my sample using mahalanobis distances, and I am doing this on SPSS using a linear regression (Analyze -> Regression -> Linear).

  • I entered the 20 questions in SPSS as the "Independents", but what would variable should be entered under the "Dependent" category?
  • Or, if I can't use SPSS to find the mahalanobis distances, is there another (easy!!) way to find the m distances?

Best Answer

Here's a procedure:

  1. Create a dummy variable and move this variable to dependent variable box.
  2. Run linear regression process as usual.
  3. Save Mahalanobis score. (A new variable will be created in your data file.)

Extraordinarily large scores will be outliers.

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