16PF Questionnaire - History and Development

History and Development

The 16PF Questionnaire was created from a fairly unique perspective among personality tests. Most personality tests are developed to measure just the pre-conceived traits that are of interest to a particular theorist or researcher. The main author of the 16PF, Raymond B. Cattell, had a strong background in the physical sciences, especially chemistry and physics, at a time when the basic elements of the physical world were being discovered, placed in the periodic table, and used as the basis for understanding the fundamental nature of the physical world and for further inquiry. From this background in the physical sciences, Cattell developed the belief that all fields are best understood by first seeking to find the fundamental underlying elements in that domain, and then developing a valid way to measure and research these elements (Cattell, 1965)

Personality research author Schuerger stated that:

When Cattell moved from the physical sciences into the field of psychology in the 1920s, he described his disappointment about finding that it consisted largely of a wide array of abstract, unrelated theories and concepts that had little or no scientific bases. He found that most personality theories were based on philosophy and on personal conjecture, or were developed by medical professionals, such as Jean Charcot and Sigmund Freud, who relied on their personal intuition to reconstruct what they felt was going on inside people, based on observing individuals with serious psycho-pathological problems. Cattell (1957) described the concerns he felt as a scientist:

"In psychology there is an ocean of spawning intuitions and comfortable assumptions which we share with the layman, and out of which we climb with difficulty to the plateaus of scientific objectivity....Scientific advance hinges on the introduction of measurement to the field under investigation….Psychology has bypassed the necessary descriptive, taxonomic, and metric stages through which all healthy sciences first must pass….If Aristotle and other philosophers could get no further by sheer power of reasoning in two thousand years of observation, it is unlikely that we shall do so now.... For psychology to take its place as an effective science, we must become less concerned with grandiose theory than with establishing, through research, certain basic laws of relationship." (p.3-5)

Thus, Cattell's goal in creating the 16PF Questionnaire was to discover the number and nature of the fundamental traits of human personality and to develop a way to measure these dimensions. At the University of London, Cattell worked with Charles Spearman who was developing factor analysis to aid in his quest to discover the basic factors of human ability. Cattell thought that could also be applied to the area of personality. He reasoned that human personality must have basic, underlying, universal dimensions just as the physical world had basic building blocks (like oxygen and hydrogen). He felt that if the basic building blocks of personality were discovered and measured, then human behavior (e.g., creativity, leadership, altruism, or aggression) could become increasingly understandable and predictable.

In 1936 Gordon Allport and H.S. Odbert hypothesized that:

This statement has become known as the Lexical Hypothesis, which posits that if there is a word for a trait, it must be a real trait. Allport and Odbert utilized this hypothesis to identify personality traits by working through two of the most comprehensive dictionaries of the English language available at the time, and extracting 18,000 personality-describing words. From this gigantic list they extracted 4500 personality-describing adjectives which they considered to describe observable and relatively permanent traits.

Cattell and his colleagues began a comprehensive program of international research aimed at identifying and mapping out the basic underlying dimensions of personality. Their goal was to systematically measure the widest possible range of personality concepts, in a belief that "all aspects of human personality which are or have been of importance, interest, or utility have already become recorded in the substance of language" (Cattell, R. B., 1943, p. 483). They wanted to include every known personality dimension in their investigation, and thus began with the largest existing compilation of personality traits (Allport and Odbert, 1936). Over time, they used factor analysis to reduce the massive list of traits by analyzing the underlying patterns among them. They studied personality data from different sources (e.g. objective measures of daily behavior, interpersonal ratings, and questionnaire results), and measured these traits in diverse populations, including working adults, university students, and military personnel. (Cattell, 1957, 1973).

The 16 Personality Factors were identified in 1946 by Raymond Cattell. He believed that in order to adequately map out personality, one had to utilize L-Data (life records or observation), Q data (information from questionnaires), and T-data (information from objective tests). The development of the 16PF Questionnaire, although confusingly named, was an attempt to develop an adequate measure of T-data. Cattell used the emerging technology of computers to analyze the list of 4500 adjectives through the statistical technique of factor analysis, which seeks to identify constructs that underlie observed variables. He organized the list of adjectives into fewer than 200 items and asked subjects to rate people whom they knew on each of the adjectives on the list (an example of L-data because the information was gathered from observers). This allowed Cattell to narrow down to 35 terms. Ratings of the 35 terms were factor-analyzed, revealing a 12 factor solution. After the 35 terms were made into self-rating items Cattell found that there were 4 additional factors, which he believed consisted of information that could only be provided through self-rating. This process allowed the use of ratings by observers, questionnaires, and objective measurements of actual behavior. Together the original 12 factors and the 4 covert factors made up the original 16 primary personality factors. As the five factor theory gained traction and research on the 16 factors continued, subsequent analysis identified five factors underlying the 16 factors. Cattell called these global factors.

Over several decades of factor-analytic study, Cattell and his colleagues gradually refined and validated their list of underlying source traits. The search resulted in the sixteen unitary traits of the 16PF Questionnaire. These traits have remained the same over the last 50 years of research. In addition, the 16PF Questionnaire traits are part of a multi-variate personality model that provides a broader framework including developmental, environmental, and hereditary patterns of the traits and how they change across the life span (Cattell, 1973, 1979, 1980).

The validity of the factor structure of the 16PF Questionnaire (the 16 primary factors and 5 global factors) has been supported by more than 60 published studies (Cattell & Krug, 1986; Conn & Rieke, 1994; Hofer and Eber, 2002). Research has also supported the comprehensiveness of the 16PF traits: all dimensions on other major personality tests (e.g., the NEO Personality Inventory, the California Psychological Inventory, the Personality Research Form, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) have been found to be contained within the 16PF scales in regression and factor-analytic studies (Conn & Rieke, 1994; Cattell, 1996).

Since its release in 1949, the 16PF Questionnaire has been revised four times: once in 1956, once in 1962, once in 1968, and the current version was developed in 1993. The US version of the test was also re-standardized in 2002, along with the development of forms for children and teenagers; versions for the UK, Ireland, France and the Netherlands were re-standardised in 2011. Additionally, there is a shortened form available primarily for employee selection and the questionnaire has been adapted into more than 35 languages. The questionnaire has also been validated in a range of international cultures over time.