A Factor Analytical Study of General Mental Health, Life Skills and Eco-Sensory Consciousness among Regular and Irregular Male and Female Pranayama Practitioners

The cardinal objective of the present study was to understand the structure of set of variables viz. Gender, Types of Pranayama, Regularity of practice, Life Skills, General Mental Health Life Skills and Eco-sensory Consciousness and to reduce measures representing communalities and to reduce the data set to a more manageable size retaining much of the original information as much as possible and to understand and extract common pure and pure and relatively independent factors, if any underlying it. A purposive sample of 360 Literate Regular and Irregular Pranayama Practitioners from across diverse data with balanced number of Males and Females (25 to 60 years) was selected from Patanjali Yogapeeth, Haridwar and Yoga/Pranayama shivara organized in NCR and Rajasthan to sample the variables Gender Type of Pranayama, Regularity of Practice, General Mental Health, Regularity of Practice, Life Skills, and Eco-sensory Consciousness. Mental Health Inventory (Jagdish & Srivastava, 1983), Life Skills Questionnaire (Clements, 2004), Ecological Attitude and Cognitive Scale (Rajamanickam, 1996) were used. SPSS 17.0 was employed to compute Factor Analysis Using Principal Component Method with Varimax Rotation in an attempt to reduce the obtained R-matrix down to its underlying dimensions by looking at which variables seem to cluster in a meaningful way. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was computed on the 23 items with Orthogonal Rotation (Varimax). The KaiserMeyer-Olkin measure verified the sampling adequacy for the analysis and all KMO values for individual items were well above the acceptable limit of .5. Bartlett's Test of Sphericity x2 indicated that correlations between items were sufficiently large for PCA. An initial analysis was run to obtain eigenvalues for each component in the data. Three components had eigenvalues over Kaiser's criterion of 1 and in combination explained 0.987% of the variance. The Scree Plot was clear and showed and justified retaining three components. The screen Plot revealed three factors. The first factor following Lexicon Hypothesis labeled as Relationships (r-.943), and Integration of Personality (r-.907); explaining a total of 84.116% of variance. These observations suggest that increase in any of the consistent variance of the factor or measure is related to increase in rest of the variance. The second factor following Lexicon Hyperthesis labeled as Typosyoga consisted of type of Pranayam (r=.0257) and Oral Obligation (r=.018). Rest of measures explain a total of 4.566% of variance. These oservations suggest that both measures are positively correlated, And the third factor consisted of Gender following Lexiocon Hypothesis labeled as Genus (r=-.257) ecplaning a total of 4.397 of variance. In sum, all three factors emerged to explain a total of 93.080% variance, and the three factors emerged to be relatively independent. Here, some crucial observations desrve mention. The Oral Obligation measure loaded significantly on the second factor(r.987). Similarly, the measure loaded significantly on the third factor (r=.002); however, however based on theory (higher loadings) the same is included in the second. All factors were found to be relatively independent. The findings are vindicated by the studies of Kail and Cavanaugh (2007); Mehta (2012). Barlow (2005), Brown et al.(2005), Cowen (2010), Salmon et al.(2009).