I am not sure if this is the ideal forum to ask so if someone can point me to another place that would be good.
In a lot of psychology research traditional explanatory factory analysis always seems the way to go in order to start some initial factorisation. In some cases I have heard that hierarchical clustering was also used (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03205389.pdf ). I see that the very popular psych package also has this approach within the package: http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/web/packages/psych/psych.pdf
I wanted to ask, have there been other statistical methods used with as good a result or is this essentially the most used techniques? I want to explore some alternatives but of course would like some citations on it.
