Final answer:
The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire was designed to identify 16 underlying personality traits from a large list of adjectives through the use of factor analysis.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, developed by Raymond Cattell, was designed to identify 16 underlying personality traits from an original list of 4504 adjectives using factor analysis. Factor analysis is a statistical method that describes variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called factors. In this case, Cattell used the method to distill the extensive list of traits into a set of 16 fundamental personality dimensions such as warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, and others. Each personality dimension in the 16PF is scored over a continuum, meaning individuals are not simply characterized as having or not having a trait, but rather, they are assessed on the degree to which they possess each trait.