Not getting the goodness of fit test in output in spss - spss

Question

I am currently using the factor analysis in spss using the maximum likelihood method. I need to extract two factors necessarily. Suppose also that we dont need any rotations.
However, the output gives me the following message: "In iteration 25, no local minimum was found and extraction was terminated" So i reduce the number of iterations, using only 7 instead of 25 and it works but i get the warning "Attempted to extract 2 factors. More than 7 iterations required. Extraction was terminated." and i do not receive any fit test results.
What should i do to fix this problem and get the fit test?
We are amateurs and not very familiar with the spss environment,we are using it for the first time. Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

I'm not sure there's a really good solution to the problem. The FACTOR procedure is only going to provide the test if it deems the solution to have converged. You can paste your FACTOR command into a syntax window and edit it to add the ECONVERGE keyword to the CRITERIA subcommand, with a larger value than the default .001, in hopes that you can get convergence extracting factors with a looser convergence criterion. That's the only possibility I can think of to get the procedure to produce the test in these circumstances. It does involve the danger of not actually having the model reasonably converge prior to stopping though. If you can get convergence with the criterion set to something not too far from the .001 default, it's probably okay, but if you have to increase the criterion dramatically, it's pretty risky.
If you want to try this, set up the factor analysis in the dialog boxes, then click Paste instead of OK. The pasted FACTOR command should look something like:
FACTOR
/VARIABLES varlist
/MISSING LISTWISE
/ANALYSIS varlist
/PRINT INITIAL EXTRACTION
/CRITERIA FACTORS(2) ITERATE(25)
/EXTRACTION ML
/ROTATION NOROTATE.
Add the ECONVERGE keyword and your chosen value to the CRITERIA subcommand:
FACTOR
/VARIABLES col1 col2 col3 col4 col5 col6 col7 col8
/MISSING LISTWISE
/ANALYSIS col1 col2 col3 col4 col5 col6 col7 col8
/PRINT INITIAL EXTRACTION
/CRITERIA FACTORS(2) ITERATE(25) ECONVERGE(.002)
/EXTRACTION ML
/ROTATION NOROTATE.
Then click Run>All to run the command. I've used .002, which is just larger than the default .001. You'll probably have to use something larger to possibly get this to work, but see my comments above.