Can you re-factor a factor analysis?

Posted by Stuart Kirkup on Jun 19, 2006; 11:13am
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Can-you-re-factor-a-factor-analysis-tp1069152.html

...and if so how do you go about it?
 
I'm trying to look for clusters within supermarket shopping behaviour,
based around the categories that people buy. Crisp and Frozen Chips,
Organic Eggs and Organic Veg.
 
My data is arranged as each customer is an individual case and then I
have a 1000 ish dichotomous variables for the categories they bought.
 
I've run an initial factoring and it comes out with some nice factor
groups but there are c150 factors, and I need to reduce these down
further. Also, while some of my factor groups "feel nice"  less than 50%
of the variation is explained. I had thought the sheer number of
variables may make it hard to get a high value. Should this tell me to
look for another approach altogether or can I carry on and re-factor the
factors? but at this point I'm a little unsure as to how to do that.
 
Do I create dichotomous variables using the rotated factor matrix? i.e.
if factor 1 was category 2, 56 and 102, then I compute a new dichotomous
variable for customers who had bought one of these categories (repeating
this for all factors) and then running something on these new "factored"
variables. My issue with
 
Or do I select the option to create factor variables and use these
variables to re-factor?
 
Thanks,
 
Stuart