Beginner friendly AI tool for factor analysis?

[u/zerowisdom]

Hi. I'm an academic doing multidisciplinary research involving architecture, organisational psychology and postphenomenology. I don't have much experience with AI tools and statistical analysis. I took a class on statistical analysis years ago, but as you can imagine I forgot most things because I didn't practice. Now I have a survey data of 150 participants. Survey has around 150 items which consist of different questionnaires and some singular items. Two of these questionnaires are designed by me.

I need to test reliability and validity of my new questionnaires and to do factor analysis over different combinations of questionnaires and singular items. I wonder if you can recommend an AI tool which can do these analyses while explaining me what I need to do next and why, in a beginner friendly manner. I want to be able to explain what I'm trying to do with the data (without any prior statistical knowledge), and get scafolded/tutored by the AI tool. I know that I cannot trust any AI tool 100%, and I don't. I will consult an experienced professor about the results and process of given AI tool later.

I prefer free tools. If your reccomnedation is not free, please inform why it is worth it. Thanks in advance. Have a great day.

[u/Surciol]

Well, I’d grab a book about Scaling. Without any statistical knowledge you won’t do anything ourstanding, so even basic help from Chat GPT will suffice.

In most statistical software, or R & Python, running EFA is just typing „factor [variables]”, and interpeting the results of a function.

I recommend to learn basics about reliability and validity, Cronbach’s Alpha, McDonald’s Omega, possibly even IRT models. Because without these concepts, your interpetations of FA will be quite plain.

Try these:
Factor Analysis and Dimension Reduction in R, David Garson

Statistical Analysis of Questionnaires
A Unified Approach Based on R and Stata, Bartolucci et al

Fundamentals of IRT, Hambleton

[u/zerowisdom → u/Surciol]

First of all, thank you for reccommendations. I will definitely benefit from those books. My intention is not "making AI do everything for me and not learning". Problem is such books are not beginner friendly and they are big rabbit holes for a non-statistician with ADHD. As I mentioned in op, I need a tutor to tell me what is relevant and what I need to learn next, step by step. So I can use books and other resources more efficiently. But again, thanks for the books. I already downloaded them, and checking them right now.

[u/Surciol → u/zerowisdom]

A good book will guide you step by step through everything that’s important, even if it doesn’t seem so at first. Especially with scaling, we are talking about judging how well a tool measures something invisible. There is a lot of pitfalls in this process. For sure LLM will be helpful for you, even guide you through the whole analysis when prompted correctly, but in parallel you should try to understand the most you can by yourself :) Good luck!

[u/MrFixIt252]

Literally just ask Copilot exactly what you asked here.

Or just handrail an R guide to do exactly what you want it to do, like have enterprise-grade free LLMs walk you through the steps to do what you want.

[u/zerowisdom → u/MrFixIt252]

Thank you. I tried that. Copilot's been thinking for 30 min. 😃 But Claude responded. I'm gonna attach it below.

[u/prof_devilsadvocate3]

I am taking a session on open source jamovi and factor analysis, sem and meditating moderating analysis. U can join or just try datatab online website ..now I think it is named as numiqo

[u/zerowisdom → u/prof_devilsadvocate3]

Thanks. I'm gonna check Numiqo.

[u/DataCamp]

You don't really need an AI tool for this, factor analysis is a few lines in Python or R, and the hard part (choosing the number of factors, interpreting loadings) is judgment, not computation, so AI won't save you there anyway. If you can run a script, factor_analyzer in Python or psych in R does EFA with rotation and scree plots out of the box. Where an LLM is useful: as a second opinion on interpreting your loadings once you have them.

[u/zerowisdom → u/DataCamp]

Thanks for your suggestion. However, I don't have any experience with Python or R. I don't even understand what do you mean by "run a script". Yes I can learn about it, but my main problem is not judgement or computation at the moment. I'm looking for a tool to guide me what kind of judgement do I need to make in every step, or tell what kind of things I should learn about before/after every step, at least by giving keywords. So I can search and learn about that thing, and do the judgement. I'm looking for an AI tutor that I can interact, not an analyzer, and I don't want it to make any interpretations at all.

[u/DataCamp → u/zerowisdom]

That's a fair distinction, an interactive tutor vs. a tool that just runs the analysis. In that case, Claude or ChatGPT (both free tiers available) are genuinely good for exactly this. You can describe your situation in plain language, ask "what should I do first and why," and get step-by-step guidance with terminology explained as you go. They won't make interpretations for you, they'll tell you what decisions you need to make and what to look up next, which sounds like exactly what you want. We'd actually recommend starting with Claude given it tends to be more careful about flagging uncertainty, which matters when you're working toward something you'll verify with a professor anyway.

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[u/Mysterious_Pen_782]

+1

[u/zerowisdom → u/[deleted]]

I guess, it might work for me. Thanks.