Primaries or Second‐order Factors: A Critical Consideration of Cattell's 16 PF Battery

Intercorrelations between certain Cattell 16 PF scales contributing to the second‐order factors exvia‐invia and adjustment‐anxiety were corrected for attenuation, in order to test Cattell's views about the relative importance of primary and second‐order factors. It was found that when the contribution of second‐order factors was extracted from the battery, very little was left over for primaries to measure, and it was concluded that in Cattell's own data there is no good evidence to suggest that primaries make any independent contribution to measurement apart from the higher‐order factors.