Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

The original Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was developed in the 1940s to assess mental health problems in psychiatric and medical settings, and it rapidly became a standard personality instrument (Hathaway & McKinley, 1940). The popularity of this true-false personality inventory was due in large part to its easy-to-use format and to the fact that the scales have well-established validity in assessing clinical symptoms and syndromes (Butcher, 2005). The MMPI underwent a major revision in the 1980s, resulting in two forms of the test: an adult version, the MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989), and an adolescent form, MMPI-A (Butcher et al., 1992). The MMPI-2 is a 567-item inventory comprised of symptoms, beliefs, and attitudes in adults above age 18. The MMPI-A is a 478-item version that is used for assessing young people, age 14–18. This article addresses only the MMPI-2. Together, the MMPI-2 and MMPI-A have become the most widely researched and used clinical assessment instruments in the field of personality assessment.

Keywords: empirical scale construction; MMPI-2; Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory; validity scales; clinical scales; restructured scales (RS scales)