I have two questions:
First, I am adapting a measurement instrument (scale) from English to Turkish. The original scale has six factors. The results of an exploratory factor analysis in SPSS, demonstrated that the adapted instrument consists of nine factors. I deleted one factor, because its items had similar loadings on different factors.
Can the adapted scale be used as an instrument measuring eight factors?
Secondly, an assessment of the internal consistency demonstrated a high Cronbach's $\alpha$ for the total scale, but a very low $\alpha$ for two factors i.e., .200 and .387.
Should these factors be removed from the instrument?
Best Answer
Before you conclude that the factors are poor, check if any items are correlating negatively with the others. Factors will adjust for this automatically, but alpha will not.
Then, rather than trying to throw away whole factors, I would look at each item in each factor; examine its correlation. Check for poor item quality (e.g. everyone or almost everyone giving the same answer).