The nine questions which cover United States policy options toward Cuba were analyzed to determining how they could be grouped as involving similar underlying factors. The question on favoring support for human rights groups in Cuba was arbitrarily recoded so the hard-line position was to oppose support for these groups. Since this is an exploratory analysis Pearson correlations were done on the 1 to 4 scaled scores.
Factor analysis is a search for some of many plausible underlying factors.
Thus while it is informative, the final analysis will need to use specific variables each of which have the highest loading on their factor to represent the factor. This will allow some determination of the importance of individual variables. As might be suspected the three factors for the most part reflect the organization of the questionnaire into sets of contiguous questions. Opposing human rights organizations in Cuba is negatively loaded on factor 1. This would suggest that factor 1 involves opposing the Cuban government.