Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire

The Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF) Questionnaire (published by the Institute of Personality and Ability Testing, http://www.ipat.com) is a comprehensive self-report inventory of normal personality that takes about 35 minutes to complete. Unlike most test authors, who try to assess a particular psychological construct, Raymond B. Cattell designed the 16PF to measure personality itself. In the 1940s, Cattell defined personality as anything about people that allows us to predict how they will behave in a given situation. He believed that any normal personality trait would be reflected in the English language, as people need adjectives to describe each other. He studied how adjectives clung together statistically as people used them to describe themselves and others. A factor analysis of the results produced the 16 factors; these, in theory, account for most of what is meant by personality.

The 16 factors are Warmth, Reasoning, Emotional Stability, Dominance, Liveliness, Rule-Consciousness, Social Boldness, Sensitivity, Vigilance, Abstractedness, Privateness, Apprehension, Openness to Change, Self-Reliance, Perfectionism, and Tension. Cattell wrote test items to measure these factors. For example, the item “I would rather be a seal in a seal colony than an eagle on a cliff” measured the first factor, Warmth, or sociability. Cattell considered intelligence to be a personality factor because it helps predict behavior, and the 16PF contains some word problems to measure reasoning. The test also has scales that measure the participant's response style. The latest version of the test, the fifth edition, was published in 1993.

After developing the test and collecting profiles from numerous people, Cattell factor-analyzed 16PF [Page 918]results. Not counting intelligence, five factors emerged, which the Institute of Personality and Ability Testing has named Extraversion, Anxiety, Self-Control, Independence, and Tough-Mindedness. Thus, Cattell started the Big Five theory, but he always thought that five factors were too few to describe human personality.

As a test of normal personality, the 16PF-5 is well suited to industrial uses, and it can be used under the Americans with Disabilities Act for preemployment screening. With its excellent psychometrics, it has become one of the most widely used personality tests in the world, available in nearly 40 languages. As psychotherapy became destigmatized in the 20th century, and as normal people seek help more than ever before, the 16PF has been increasingly used in the clinic as well.