The 16PF provides a measure of personality and can also be used by psychologists, and other mental health professionals, as a clinical instrument to help diagnose psychiatric disorders, and help with prognosis and therapy planning.
The 16PF can also provide information relevant to the clinical and counseling process, such as an individual's capacity for insight, self-esteem, cognitive style, internalization of standards, openness to change, capacity for empathy, level of interpersonal trust, quality of attachments, interpersonal needs, attitude toward authority, reaction toward dynamics of power, frustration tolerance, and coping style.
Thus, the 16PF instrument provides clinicians with a normal-range measurement of anxiety, adjustment, emotional stability and behavioral problems.
This method takes as its starting point the matrix of inter-correlations between these variables in an attempt to uncover the underlying source traits of human personality.
The 16PF yields scores on primary and second-order "global" traits, thereby allowing a multilevel description of each individual's unique personality profile.
The item content typically sounds non-threatening and asks simple questions about daily behavior, interests, and opinions.
"), they tend instead to ask about daily, concrete situations, e.g.: Cattell argued that self-ratings relate to self-image, and are affected by self-awareness, and defensiveness about one's actual traits.
The Acquiescence (ACQ) scale's purpose is to index the degree to which the examinee agreed with items regardless of what was being asked.
A high score might indicate that the examinee misunderstood the item content, responded randomly, has an unclear self-image, or had a "yea-saying" response style.
The test can be hand-scored using a set of scoring keys, or computer-scored by mailing-in or faxing-in the answer sheet to the publisher IPAT.
Because bipolar scales are designated with "high" or "low" for each factor, a high score should not be considered to reflect a positive personality characteristic and a low score should not be considered to reflect a negative personality characteristic.
In the Fourth and Fifth Editions of the 16PF, there were five global factors that seem to correspond fairly closely to the "Big Five personality traits".
Norman factor-analyzing responses to the same items as the 16PF, replicating Cattell's work and suggested that five factors would be sufficient.
However, other popular big five models consider Dominance as a facet of several Big-Five traits, including Extraversion, Dis-Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.
[41]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 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.
Odbert hypothesized that: Those individual differences that are most salient and socially relevant in people's lives will eventually become encoded into their language; the more important such a difference, the more likely is it to become expressed as a single word.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 used 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.
[43] Over time, they used factor analysis to reduce the massive list of traits by analyzing the underlying patterns among them.
[47][48][49] In 1949 Cattell found that there were 4 additional factors, which he believed consisted of information that could only be provided through self-rating.
Over several decades of factor-analytic study, Cattell and his colleagues gradually refined and validated their list of underlying source traits.
[60][61][62] The 16PF was distributed through the Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT), founded by Cattell and based in Savoy, Illinois.
It resulted from the natural affinity of five primary traits that defined different reasons for an individual to move toward versus away from other people (see below).
They found that there was a natural tendency for these traits to go together in the real world, and to define an important domain of human behavior—social behavior.
In addition, then the global factors provide the overarching, conceptual framework for understanding the meaning and function of each of the primary traits.
However, it is still the scores on the more specific primary traits that define the rich, unique personality make-up of any individual.