Sixteen Primary-Factor Scales

This 163-item research collection measures the 16 primary trait factors of Raymond Cattell's Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) tradition, under the fifth edition's factor names — from Warmth, Reasoning, and Emotional Stability through Vigilance, Privateness, and Tension — each with its public-domain IPIP scale. It is a longer, better-measured counterpart to the platform's 48-item Sixteen-Factor Personality Profile.

Cattell believed the trait lexicon could be distilled empirically: starting from the Allport–Odbert term list, he condensed thousands of descriptors into rating clusters compact enough to factor (Cattell, 1943), then spent decades pursuing the primary 'source traits' he took to underlie surface behavior. The 16PF operationalized his answer — sixteen oblique primary factors, documented at length in the questionnaire's handbook (Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970), with broader second-order dimensions computed from them.

The line to the Big Five runs straight through this program: it was reanalyses of ratings built on Cattell's variables that kept recovering five broad factors (Tupes & Christal, 1992). The 16PF tradition kept the finer grain, and its fifth edition (Conn & Rieke, 1994) standardized the modern factor names used here — making this collection both an ancestor of and an alternative to five-factor description.

The scales here are original public-domain IPIP items keyed to constructs similar to the 16PF's primary factors; scores here are not scores on the 16PF itself, whose proprietary norms, validity studies, and global-factor scoring do not transfer to this form. Scale membership and reverse-keying follow Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items) verbatim, with construct names as catalogued at ipip.ori.org.

Each primary factor is reported against Eugene–Springfield Community Sample reference values in the norms section.

“Act wild and crazy.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a population percentile against the cited reference sample, with a reliability-based confidence range where α is published.

Norms computed from the Eugene-Springfield Community Sample (ESCS) — Lewis R. Goldberg’s adult community panel from Eugene and Springfield, Oregon (Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/UF52WY). This is a community sample and is NOT nationally representative. The mean, standard deviation, reference N and Cronbach’s α were computed directly from the raw IPIP item-level responses on THIS scale’s exact item set and reverse-keying (complete cases); reference N varies by scale and is shown with each scale below. The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from that computed α.

Public-domain items from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, L. R., 1999; ipip.ori.org). Scale membership and reverse-keying taken verbatim from Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items). Construct names from ipip.ori.org.