Research on Retail service quality and customer loyalty is being carried out presently by me.

Brief Description of the Study:

In our Scope, Retail Service Quality is considered as the independent variable. Further, it has five dimensions or Variables (Physical Aspects, Reliability, Personal Interaction, Problem Solving and Policy).

Meanwhile, Customer Loyalty is considered as the Dependent Variable.

Brief Description About the statistical techniques:

Advance statistical techniques as Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis will be used.

Our questions:

Question No 01:

Whether Questions or items of both independent variable (Retail Service Quality) and Dependent Variable (Customer Loyalty) together can be factorized to get the unique construct through the Exploratory Factor Analysis?

“According to the Malhotra (2004), No Distinction in terms of independent and dependent variable is made in factor analysis. Further, He documented that, Main purpose of the exploratory factor analysis is to identify a new, smaller set of uncorrelated variables to replace the original set of correlated variables. Based on his statement, we can’t factorize the Questions or items of both independent variable (Retail Service Quality) and Dependent Variable (Customer Loyalty) together to construct the model. It means that, as usual there is a relationship between dependent and independent variable”

“In contrast, the same author Malhotra (2004) noted that factor analysis is an inter dependence technique in that an entire set of interdependent relationships is examined”

Based on the above viewpoints,

I am confused on whether questions or items of both independent variable (Retail Service Quality) and Dependent Variable (Customer Loyalty) together can be factorized to get the unique construct through the Exploratory Factor Analysis?

Question No 02:

Researchers in the field of management and marketing suggested that, before performing the confirmatory factor analysis, exploratory factor analysis may be used to construct the unique model, which gives the real pathway to confirm the model via confirmatory factor analysis. Meanwhile, many researchers in the marketing field performed the confirmatory factor analysis with the questions or items of both the independent variable and dependent variable together to confirm the model.

Can questions or items of both independent variable (Retail Service Quality) and dependent variable (Customer Loyalty) together be factorized to get the unique construct through the Confirmatory Factor Analysis?

In that scenario,

Question No 03:

What is the main purpose of both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis?

Thanks,

Achchuthan, S

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