Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory MMPI

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Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
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Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test
Construction

• Most widely used objective test devised to
  measure personality and psychopathology
• Wanted to develop test that would distinguish
  between normal and abnormal/clinical groups
• Criterion-driven (external) test construction
  approach
• Criterion-driven test developers bet that their
  criterion groups will differ markedly on their
  responses to a wide variety of items a good
  theory of why they differ in their responses is
  not required for this strategy of test
  construction

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Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test
Construction

• Criterion-driven Large, diverse pool of items
  administered to criterion groups items with
  means that are substantially different for the
  groups are kept
• Developed in 1930s time of growing skepticism
  about more construct-driven (deductive tests)
• MMPI Criterion groups Initially 800 Psychiatric
  inpatients of University of Minnesota Hospital
  but numbers reduced to find homogeneous groupings
  (8 groups of 50 patients)

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Final 8 Criterion Groups

• 1. Hypochondriac
• 2. Depressed
• 3. Hysteric
• 4. Psychopathic deviate
• 5. Paranoid
• 6. Psychasthenic
• 7. Schizophrenic
• 8. Hypomaniac

• Body fears and illness
• Depressed individuals
• Physical problem with no cause
• Criminal, antisocial problems
• Poor reality testing, delusions
• Doubts and unreasonable fears
• Dramatic psychotic symptoms
• Irritability and hyperactivity

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Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test
Construction (cont.)

• MMPI Control groups 700 people, primarily
  relatives and visitors of patients, excluding
  mental patients. Control group considered
  problematic by many because relatives of
  inpatients is likely not a representative sample
  of controls.
• Item pool over 1000 true-false items assembled,
  566 items selected (MMPI-II has 567 items)

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Two Further Clinical Scales

• Added later, using somewhat sloppy criterial
  procedures
• Masculinity-femininity
• Social-introversion
• Most of these 10 clinical scales have many
  subtle items (e.g., I drink an unusually large
  amount of water everyday discriminates hysteria
  criterion group from normals)

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Three Validity Scales

• Lie Scale Naïve attempts to fake good
• F Scale Attempt to fake bad
• K Scale Defensiveness (empirically constructed)
• Attempts to locate items that distinguished
  normal from abnormal groups when both produced a
  normal test pattern

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Interpretation and MMPI-II

• Often people obtain scores with elevations on
  several subscales rather than just one
• Led to shift in use, interpretation, and study of
  the MMPI and MMPI-2
• Clinical scales re-named with numbers 1,2,9 and
  0
• Highest 1 or 2 elevations typically interpreted
  (e.g., two point code of 1-3)
• Higher elevations correspond with severity

• MMPI-II released in 1989 contains expanded
  norms, and updates and improvements to items
• Items fixed that were out of date, awkward,
  sexist, problematic
• Administered to 2900 subjects from 7 geographic
  regions in U.S. to improve control group problems