Raymond E. Christal was a giant in modern military psychology. He made important and lasting contributions to occupational measurement, personality testing (“the true father of the Big Five”), abilities testing, policy capturing, and judgment analysis, as well as cross-national collaborations in testing and measurement. His occupational measurement research was the basis for the Comprehensive Occupational Data Analysis (CODAP) system, which is still used by the U.S. Air Force, other U.S. and international militaries, as well as the civilian sector.
He was the father of the now widely used “Big Five” personality model, based on a study he conducted with Ernest Tupes in the late 1950s on Air Force officer peer reports. He wrote an influential and controversial paper on the use of policy capturing methodology long before multiple regression modeling was the prediction staple it is today.