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16 Personality Factors

Background

  • the 16PF is a self-report personality test
  • developed by Raymond B. Cattell , Maurice Tatsuoka, and Herbert Eber
  • provides a measure of normal personality and can also be used by psychologists and other mental health professionals, as a clinical instrument to help diagnose psychiatric disorders, as well as help with prognosis and therapy planning
  • It provides clinicians with a normal-range measurement of anxiety, adjustment, emotional stability, and behavioral problems. It can also be used within other areas of psychology, such as career and occupational selection.

Item Format

  • Cattell argued that self-ratings relate to self-image and are affected by self-awareness, and defensiveness about one’s actual traits
  • compared to other personality instruments that ask questions such as:
    • “I am a warm and friendly person; I am not a worrier; I am an even tempered person.”
  • 16PF ask questions about daily, concrete situations

History

  • In the 1940s, Cattell began what was to be many years of research into personality traits
  • Cattell was frustrated with personality theories that only seemed to describe separate aspects of personality, he set out to try and identify all of the traits that made up a person
  • Because of WWI and WWII, he hoped that if human nature could be better understood, it would be easier to solve global political and economic problems
  • In terms of boiling down the traits and establishing a formal framework for understanding personality, Cattell used factor analysis
  • Starting with 4500 adjectives that could describe people, he then went through a laborious process of grouping these adjectives into 171 clusters
  • After several years, Cattell and his team of psychologists were able to boil down the set of traits to 16
  • Once Cattell had created a personality theory, he continued to research its effectiveness and refine the questions until 1978
  • During this period and beyond, 5 different editions of questionnaire were published by the Institute of Personality and Ability Testing, Inc., which was acquired by PAN in 2015
  • Moreover, the 16 traits measured by the 16PF questionnaire can also be grouped into 5 broad dimensions known as the Global Factors, which correlate strongly with the Big Five

Scoring

  • can be hand-scored using a test of scoring keys, or computer-scored by mailing-in or faxing-in the answer sheet to the publisher IPAT
  • There is also a software system that can be used to administer, score, and provide reports on the test results directly in the professional’s office
  • In addition, there is an interest-based system which can also provide administration, scoring, and reports in a range of different languages

Interpretation

  • Computer Generated Interpretative Reports
    • Career Development Report
    • Karson Clinical Report
    • Cattell Comprehensive Personality Interpretation
    • Teamwork Development Report
  • Books that help with test interpretation
    • 16PF Interpretation in Clinical Practice (Karson, Karson, & O’Dell, 1997)
    • The 16PF: Personality in Depth (Cattell, H.B., 1989)
    • Essentials of the 16PF (Cattell, H.E., & Schuerger, J.M., 2003)