Comrey, Andrew L. (1923–)

Andrew L. Comrey was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on April 14, 1923. His childhood was marred by the Great Depression of the 1930s; however, he was a brilliant student and entered Union College with a full scholarship. While he was at Union College, his psychology teacher, Ernest M. Ligon, introduced him to psychological testing. Comrey worked in Ligon's laboratory giving Stanford-Binet IQ tests to young people in the Character Research Project. During this time, he read Louis Thurstone's Vectors of Mind and planned to attend the University of Chicago to study with Thurstone. However, World War II changed his plans. Andrew completed his BS degree in science and entered the U.S. Navy. During his service, he met and married Barbara Sherman, who was also serving in the military. They have two daughters, Cynthia and Corinne.

After the war, Comrey attended the University of Southern California. He studied measurement, psychometrics, and statistics with J. P. Guilford and earned his PhD in 1949. His dissertation on fundamental measurement included a treatise on a method of absolute ratio scaling. This method, published in Psychometrika, was among the most cited studies on scaling at that time.

Comrey's first academic appointment was at the University of Illinois. In 1951, he accepted a faculty position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been at UCLA since 1951. During his time at UCLA, he was a Fulbright Research Fellow and held a National Science Foundation senior postdoctoral research fellowship. He has served as president of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology. His major research contributions included the development of his own complete system of factor analysis. He invented the minimum residual method of factor extraction and the tandem criteria of rotation.

The minimum residual method of factor extraction is a controversial method that avoided the problem associated with communality estimates. The tandem criteria involved a two-phase procedure to obtain a simple structure solution. The first of the two criteria is very useful in finding general factors.

Comrey was the first researcher to write a fully integrated computer program that would process raw data through correlations, factor extraction, and rotation. He later used this process to develop the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS). The CPS was the result of his research on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and other personality tests. During the development of the CPS, he created the factored homogeneous item dimension as a basic unit of analysis in factor analysis.

Comrey has published more than 150 articles, chapters, and books. His textbook A First Course in Factor Analysis remains a popular and highly regarded work. It has been translated into Japanese and Italian.