Sixteen Personality Questionnaire (16PF)

The Sixteen Personality Questionnaire (16PF) is one of the oldest commercially available measures of normal adult personality. It is used in a variety of settings, including personnel selection, counseling, career development, and outplacement consulting. The inventory has also been utilized extensively in academic settings to advance the understanding of personality structure, its roots, and predictive power. Over 1,200 articles and book chapters involving the 16PF have been published to date, and many new studies are under way.

The 16PF was created by Raymond B. Cattell who, at the time, was a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. Cattell's main research interest was to identify the primary elements of human personality. He called those elements traits—entities whose organization and dynamic interrelationships lead to the behaviors one can observe or wishes to predict. Rather than adhering to some a priori theory, Cattell used a mathematical technique called factor analysis to identify basic traits among a large set of behavioral observations. He started with the list of approximately 4,500 adjectives describing human behavior that was developed in 1936 by Gordon W. Allport and Henry S. Odbert. Cattell then successively reduced this list to 171 terms representing synonym groups, 35 surface-trait variables, and finally, 16 primary traits that formed the basis of his future personality questionnaire. Specifically, Cattell factor analyzed empirical data from two sources, peer ratings (observations of people in everyday situations) and self-reports (questionnaire responses to a large number of behavioral statements), in an attempt to determine which primary traits would be identified similarly from the respective sources. The results generally converged to a 16-dimensional structure that was used as the basis for the first edition of the 16PF questionnaire published in 1949. Since then, four revisions have been conducted to improve and refine the instrument, which is now copyrighted and distributed by the Institute of Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT).