William Revelle

Who is William Revelle?

William Revelle is a psychology professor at Northwestern University working in personality psychology. Revelle studies the biological basis of personality and motivation, psychometric theory, the structure of daily mood, and models of attention and memory. He is a proponent of and contributor to the R Project. He is the author of R's psych package. He is a co-author of the Very Simple Structure method of determining how many factors to extract from a correlational matrix when performing factor analysis. He developed Revelle's Beta to "estimate general factor saturation of a test" but later asserted that McDonald's Omega is a better estimate. He also developed Item Cluster Analysis. He is an advocate for the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment methodology for telemetric evaluation of personality across multiple domains. His Personality, Cognition, and Motivation Laboratory at Northwestern has administered an online assessment using the SAPA methodology since approximately 2004.

Revelle graduated from Pomona College in 1965, abandoning a mathematics major in favor of psychology.