# The Varieties of Agency in Human-Smart Device Relationships: The Four Agency Profiles
## 3 Results
### Exploratory Factorial Analysis  
With the exploratory factorial analysis, we aimed at investigating the emergence and patterning of the constructs previously specified. We were especially interested in whether and how the constructs of user agency and device agency would emerge from the data. The preliminary statistical analyses showed that the data is non-normal, but conducting exploratory factorial analysis is valid in these circumstances, because we are not testing a theory (merely exploring whether certain conceptualizations of agency make sense) or aiming to generalize the results beyond this specific sample [44]. When designing the survey, our intention was to create a new measure to explore a variety of nuances of agency. As we did not aim to artificially heighten Cronbach's alpha by building in some redundancy to the scale, that is, repeating the same question in different versions [45], a low Cronbach's alpha is to be expected. Indeed, not unexpectedly, the Cronbach alphas were only 0.44 for device agency and 0.62 for user agency. As the low alphas might raise some discussion, we would like to note that the Cronbach alpha has been a widely discussed measure with a lot of disagreement on the appropriate acceptability range. Many scholars have warned against using any automatic cutoff criteria, suggesting that researchers should not draw conclusions on scale adequacy based only on [PERSON]'s alpha, because the purpose and stage of the research as well as the decisions that are supposed to be made using the scale all influence what is adequate reliability [46]. We conducted a Principal Axis Factor analysis with oblique rotation (Promax) on all 35 agency-related questions in the survey. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure (KMO = 0.84) verified the sampling adequacy for the analysis. All except six of the KMO values for individual items were greater than 0.5. Since the six items were not included in the agency factors that emerged in the factorial analysis, they were not part of the further statistical analyses, and hence, their low KMO did not present a problem. Eight of the factors that emerged in the exploratory factorial analysis had eigenvalues larger than [PERSON]'s criterion of 1. In combination, these eight factors explained 54.89% of the total variance. The scree plot was rather ambiguous, containing inflexions that justified retaining two, four, six, or eight factors. Six of the factors made theoretical sense and were named user agency, device agency, self-extension, functionality, anthropomorphism, and feelings. We conducted a second exploratory factorial analysis focusing on the 16 survey questions concerning only agency. A Principal Axis Factor analysis was conducted with oblique rotation (Promax), extracting two factors (user agency and device agency). The KMO of 0.78 confirmed the adequacy of the sampling. As expected, two factors emerged: user agency and device agency. They had eigenvalues of 2.07 and 3.34, respectively, and together, they explained 33.81% of the variance. The goal was to obtain a simple factorial structure [47], where each factor had only a few high loadings and the rest of them were (close to) zero. We removed variables that had no loadings on either factor or had low loadings, as well as variables that cross-loaded on both factors. One variable at a time was deleted. The KMO was 0.7. The resulting two factors are shown in Table 4.  
The variables included in these two factors had significant loadings on both factors, had no cross-loadings, and the scales had good internal consistency. Moreover, when selecting the final items to be included in the factors, we took into account the fact that when the sample size is greater than 100, factor loadings of 0.30 and higher can be considered significant [47]. These new constructs had Cronbach's alphas of 0.66 (device agency) and 0.62 (user agency). According to [48], values of 0.6-0.7 are acceptable Cronbach alphas, especially in an exploratory study where a new scale is being tested.