User:MetaMax

Greetings Fellow Wikipedians

In recent years I have become a user of Wikipedia and a believer in making accurate information freely available on the internet. Feeling obligated to “give something back” I want to share my knowledge about the life and work of Raymond Cattell. I became aware of Cattell’s writing in the late 1960s. In 1971, I completed my Master of Arts Thesis at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, using Cattell’s well known personality test, the Sixteen Personality Factors Questionnaire (16PF). The thesis was entitled “The 16PF as an indicator of performance in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game,” and was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. In 1974 I completed a PhD at the University of Ottawa, focusing upon relationships between personality and motivation measures developed within Cattell’s structure-based systems theory of human behaviour. The thesis results were published in two articles in Educational and Psychological Measurement. I met Dr. Cattell in 1971 at a conference sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Psychology of the University of Alberta. Since then we corresponded frequently about research, met at conferences, published together, and I became his official biographer. As a result I often visited with him for lengthy periods to conduct interviews and examine his voluminous personal papers. During the last 36 years I have interviewed many of his colleagues, critics and family members. Currently I am using multivariate methods developed by Cattell to investigate vaccines for melanoma and avian influenza.

John Stuart Gillis, PhD