Comparative analysis of the PSY-5 and MCMI-III in assessing personality disorders

Abstract

According to Harkness and McNulty (1994) the Personality Psychopathology-Five (PSY-5) including in the MMPI-2-RF is a dimensional model developed to conceptualize the traits underlying personality psychopathology. The present study examines the correspondence between PSY-5 scales and MCMI-III Personality Disorder (PD) scales. The current sample includes 377 clients (167 men and 210 women) from private practice settings who completed the MMPI-2-RF and MCMI-III. Besides correlation analysis, we performed several multiple regression analyses taking the PSY-5 scales as dependent variables and the MCMI-III PD scales as predictor variables to study the shared variance between both groups of scales. The analysis was performed using the stepwise method and the tolerance level was set at 0.60. The percentage of variance of each of PSY-5 scales explained by MCMI-III PD scales ranged between 40% and 50.8%, and several MCMI-III PD scales were significant in predicting the PSY-5 scales. Implications of the results will be discussed.