*4.1. Analysis of Consumers' Attitudes towards Local Food Products (LFPs)—Factor Analysis*

As a next step, the authors wanted to analyze whether for a collection of observed variables there is a set of factors that can explain the interrelationships among those variables, by means of unified factor analysis. The factor structure matrix presented in Table 2 contains factor loadings that represent the correlation coefficients between the extracted factors and the variables and indicates the importance of each variable for a single factor [55,56]. Data were processed in the statistical package SPSS for Windows, version 22. In order to examine the latent structure of consumer attitudes on LFPs, factor analysis with the principal component method was applied. As the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was satisfied (KMO = 0.931), Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant (χ<sup>2</sup> = 15,618.91; *p* < 0.000) therefore the factor analysis was conducted. Using the Cattell scree criterion, five factors were retained. Based on saturation in the assembly matrix and analysis of the internal consistency of the questionnaire, it was decided to exclude three items from the further analysis, which had saturations below 0.40 and whose exclusion increased the coefficient of reliability. To achieve a simple structure, the factors were rotated with Varimax rotation. Factor scores were established, and we calculated the Cronbach's reliability coefficient for each factor. Cronbach's reliability coefficients are 0.923, 0.890, 0.791, 0.723, and 0.714.



Taking into account the saturation shown in the circuit matrix (Table 2), the obtained factors are grouped into five units. The first factor accounts for 32.29% of the variance in the model (eight items), the second factor for 11.01% of variance (seven items), the third factor for 6.49 % of variance (three items), the fourth factor accounts for 4.93% of variance (six items), and the fifth factor with three items accounts for 4.18% of variance in the overall model. Squared factor loadings:

