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"A decade ago we began working on the problem of analyzing psychotherapeutic interviews. As time passed and as solutions to our research problems emerged, we began to realize the solutions had general implications. Going from the specific to the general carries within it the danger of tunnel vision but sometimes has the advantage of conferring uniqueness of perspective. It also has the realistic advantage of being grounded in actual research problems. In our view a fundamental emphasis in the following essay is the insistence on faithful representation of subject behavior over periods of observation. This may be contrasted with the usual transformation of behavior to scores in which information is discarded and in which one draws the first step away from actuality. A second fundamental emphasis is on analyzing the representation of behavior with a minimum of assumptions. Although powerful and sophisticated mathematical techniques related to those discussed in this work exist, they seemed to us to require assumptions we were unwilling to make or to require analysis of but a fraction of the data. Thus the advantages of the use of distribution functions and of significance levels were, for us, offset and we were persuaded to follow our own path. As we proceeded in our search for a solution to our problems, the analysis of naturalistic data came to be viewed as a kind of factor analysis of behavior representations rather than of scores. These mathematical partitions may serve as a ground for hypothesis formation, psychological induction and further, more refined study. We conceive of the process of naturalistic observation and analysis as involving observation, the representation of the results of observation, analysis of the representation and the creation of a new framework for observation and further analysis culminating finally in rather formal hypotheses, theories and controlled experimentation. Methodologically our essay may be characterized as factor analytic or Thurstonian; logically, as Baconian; and procedurally as Darwinian or naturalistic. Although our use of the methods to be described has been limited to the analysis of psychotherapeutic interviews, we can envisage other uses by clinical and counseling psychologists, social psychologists, content analysts, comparative psychologists observing organisms in relatively free situations and, perhaps, taxonomists"--

Factor analysis.

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Factor analysis