In the field of fault diagnosis, the deviations from normal operating conditions are monitored to identify the type of faults and find their root causes. One of the most representative methods is the statistical approaches, due to a large amount of advantages. However, ambiguous diagnosis results can be generated according to fault magnitudes, even if the same fault occurs. To tackle this issue, this work proposes principal component analysis (PCA) based method with qualitative information. The PCA model is constructed under normal operation data and the residuals from faulty conditions are calculated. The significant changes of these residuals are recorded to make the information for identifying the types of fault. This model can be employed easily and the tasks for building are smaller than these of other common approaches. The efficacy of the proposed model is illustrated in Tennessee Eastman process.