Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Case Study

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The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. History: The instrument is called Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). It was developed by Hathaway and McKinley, who were working at the University of Minnesota in the late 1930s. It was first intended for use with an adult population, nevertheless, it was then extended to include adolescents, mostly for youths in the middle years, that are ages 15 and 16. The reading level require is at least a sixth-grade, so it was absolutely not appropriate for average children below the age of about 13 or for retarded persons. The MMPI can be administered to bright children of 11 or 12 years, great caution has to be exercised in the interpretation of the results. The MMPI was completely …show more content…

1) It is used in occupational health. This is where doubt as to what is really wrong with the patient exists. 2) It is used in ‘high-risk’ professions such as the airline industry where airline pilots, law enforcement (police) or workers in the nuclear power industry to assess psychological stability in work. However MMPI-2 has one major disadvantage for the occupational health physician which is that the MMPI-2 is a rigorously licensed test and can only be purchased, administered and interpreted by a very experienced clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. Because of this, it is regarded as a complex diagnostic investigation for relatively infrequent use. Administering time: It takes most people between 60 minutes and 90 minutes to complete the MMPI-2. Items: The MMPI-2 has 567 item, which are true/false self-report measure of a person's psychological state. There are nine validity scales or ‘lie’ scales, assessing for lying, defensiveness, faking decent and faking evil and among others. These scales make it very difficult to fake the MMPI-2 results. MMPI 2 can be used to determine the following clinical …show more content…

Validity The MMPI used a normative sample of 2600 adults drawn from different regions of the country. As of date there are more than 10 000 published papers using the MMPI-2, and every year hundreds of papers are added to it. A symptom validity scale (FBS) has been added to the list in recent years to help eliminate symptom exaggeration and has been reported as having very low false-positive rates.

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