Hi Waqas,

a similar question has been debated here:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/CFA_without_EFA_in_a_questionnaire_validation_process#view=5c1a570df8ea5238e17edadb

Best,

Holger

Not necessarily. I have the experience. I published a paper using EFA:

Article Korean Patient-Perceived Satisfaction Scale of Community-Bas...

We published a paper using EFA and then CFA:

Article Psychometric Evaluation of a Patient Safety Competency Self-...

Holger Steinmetz Thank You for Your Useful response, Thread is useful.

The differences between EFA and CFA are often overstated Despite their names, both can be used in an exploratory manner CFA models can be modified if the model does not fit well EFA is sometimes used by researchers even though they have a welldeveloped idea about the factor structure and wants to confirm it Both methods are based on discovering number of underlying factors for a set of items and estimating how strongly they relate to the factors.

Both methods of factor analysis are sensitive psychometric analysis that provide information about reliability, item quality, and validity Scale may be modified by eliminating items or changing the structure of the measure Either method may be used as a preliminary step to evaluate a measure or set of subscales that will be computed and used in later research.

http://web.pdx.edu/~newsomj/pmclass/EFA%20and%20CFA.pdf