Finding and Organizing Your Respondent's Scores on the Cattell

Finding the information

Scores for both the primary factors and the second-order factors can be found in the Profile Data Packet.

Organizing the scores

All of the information you receive on your respondent can be rather overwhelming. It is probably best to determine in what factors your respondent scores extremely high or low. Make a list of the characteristics of those scores on the extreme ends of these scales, and try to see if these descriptions can somehow fit together in an intuitive way. Use your judgment, based on the other information you have on your respondent, as to how applicable certain adjectives may be to your respondent.

Due to the statistical nature of the 16PF, your respondent is likely to score more extremely on one of the primary fifteen factors than on one of the five second-order factors. If your respondent scores average on all five subscales, do not discard the second-order factors as entirely unimportant; they can help you see how the primary factors tend to fit together. You can also observe how your respondent conforms or fails to conform to the general pattern of fit into the five secondary factors.

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