 Which of these items most strongly bear on the political attitudes of the groups polled may be difficult to determine a priori.However, since factor analysis is a symmetric computation on the matrix of items and people, the original factor analysis of items, (when these are Likert scales) selects not just those items that are in a similar domain, but more generally, those items that have a similar consensus.The added advantage of this factor analytic technique is that items are automatically arranged along a factor so that the highest Likert ratings are also the highest CBA standard scores.