Factor analysis is a versatile class of psychometric techniques used by researchers to provide insight into the psychological dimensions (factors) that may account for the relationships among variables in a given dataset. The primary goal of a factor analysis is to determine a more parsimonious set of variables (i.e., fewer than the number of original variables) to generate a model for the data that can be used to aid the interpretation of those constructs. However, the literature on factor analysis can be mathematically complex and filled with contradictory viewpoints on almost every aspect of the technique. The goal of this article is to provide a brief overview of factor analytic procedures to help school psychologists become more effective consumers of this type of research.