Cattell 16PF Personality Factors: 16-factor personality model

About the Cattell 16PF Personality Factors

Raymond Cattell believed that personality, like cognitive ability, could be empirically mapped through factor analysis of large item pools. Starting in the late 1930s he and his collaborators collected approximately 4,500 trait-descriptive adjectives from the English language (the 'lexical hypothesis' assumption: if a personality trait is real and important, it will eventually be encoded in everyday vocabulary). They reduced this to about 171 trait clusters, then applied factor analysis to identify the underlying dimensions.

Cattell's factor analyses pointed to 16 distinct primary personality factors, labeled with neutral letters (A, B, C, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4). Each factor was bipolar: A ranged from reserved to outgoing, C from emotional to stable, H from shy to bold, and so on. The 16 primaries could be further reduced to 5 'second-order' factors that approximate the modern Big Five.

The 1949 16PF Questionnaire operationalized the 16 factors with 187 items (true/false and multiple choice). It became the most-used adult personality test of the 1950s-70s, particularly in industrial/organizational psychology and counseling settings. The modern 16PF Fifth Edition (1993) is still in active commercial use through IPAT. Cattell's factor-analytic approach also directly shaped the modern Big Five personality model (1980s-90s), though the Big Five settled on 5 broad factors where Cattell had argued for 16 primary + 5 second-order.

The 2 subtests

Sample Items (Illustrative)

Items are typically presented as statements or questions with multiple-choice or Likert scale response options. Responses are scored to indicate levels of each personality factor.

These are illustrative samples, not actual items from the protected test.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Raymond B. Cattell (1949). Cattell 16PF Personality Factors.

16PF items and modern editions remain under IPAT (Institute for Personality and Ability Testing) copyright. We document the test's history and significance.