Personality profiles of police candidates

Recently, Eber (1991) reported on several large-scale studies of law enforcement candidates. The main measures were the two parts of the Clinical Analysis Questionnaire (Krug, Cattell, & IPAT, 1980). Part I consists of the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire Scales, while Part II is devoted to 12 measures of psychopathology. The most striking finding was a clear personality profile characterized by a strong pattern of self-discipline or Control, Tough Poise, and low Anxiety. Our study hypothesis was that several police personality profiles would be found. This conjecture was tested on the 16PF scores of two samples of 275 police candidates by means of the Ward (1963) hierarchical clustering procedure and the Milligan/Sokal (1980) nonhierarchical K-means cluster procedures. Three distinct score profiles were isolated in both samples.