In this video I briefly describe the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory or MMPI, which consists of 338 statements to which subjects respond True or False. I also describe criterion keying, which is a technique for finding patterns of responses for groups of people who are already known to differ in some way, such as already having been diagnosed with a particular mental disorder.
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Video Transcript
Hi I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video I’m going to talk about a common personality assessment for clinical use and this is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory or MMPI. This was first introduced in 1943 but it has subsequently been updated in 2008 released as the MMPI 2-RF. But in this video I’m just going to use the acronym MMPI for simplicity.
So the MMPI consists of 338 statements about the self to which a subject will respond either true or false depending on how much they think that statement matches their sense of self. These statements can be organized into ten main sub-skills assessing things like masculinity or femininity, levels of depression, paranoia etc. and there’s even a section designed to catch faking, something I mentioned in the previous video.
Now an interesting way about the way that the MMPI is used is that it uses a technique called criterion keying. So rather than thinking about the ways that people differ and then trying to design an assessment that will capture those differences, it essentially does this in reverse. So what do I mean by that? Well, what criterion keying does is you take people that you already know differ in some way; so you take two groups of people and you know that they’re different in some way, and then you give both groups the MMPI and then you analyze the responses and you looked for patterns that occur between those two groups.
So for example I might pick a particular group of people with a particular disorder, so I might have a group of people who’ve been diagnosed with depression, and then I might have another group of people who have not been diagnosed with depression, and I have all of these people take the MMPI and then I look for characteristic differences between the two groups. I might notice that people with depression tend to respond in a particular way to certain items on the MMPI and people who have not been diagnosed with depression don’t have that same pattern of responses. And that might tell me something about depression and I might then be able to use people’s answers to the MMPI to assess whether or not they’re at risk for depression. I might say “well these responses really match the people who have already been diagnosed with depression rather than matching people who haven’t been diagnosed” and that might tell me something about this person.
Ok, now we have to be careful that there’s a few assumptions involved in that process. And so these assumptions are, first of all that the groups that we’re looking at have accurate diagnosis. If it turns out that the diagnosis of depression that these people have received is not accurate, or schizophrenia, or any other disorder, then that’s going to mix up this process of looking for this pattern because maybe some of those people shouldn’t be in the depression group.
And another thing is that it assumes that any of the patterns that we find are actually relevant to depression. They might not actually be relevant to the diagnosis of depression. They could be related to something else, and they just happen to occur between these two groups. So those are two important assumptions to keep in mind when you think about analyzing the pattern of responses from the MMPI. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
