Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory - History

History

The original authors of the MMPI were Starke R. Hathaway, PhD, and J. C. McKinley, MD. The MMPI is copyrighted by the University of Minnesota.

The MMPI has been considered the gold standard in personality testing ever since its inception as an adult measure of psychopathology and personality structure in 1939. Many additions and changes to the measure have been made over time, including the addition of dozens of supplemental, validity, and other content scales to improve interpretability of the original Clinical Scales, changes in the number of items in the measure, and other adjustments. The most historically significant developmental changes include:

• In 1989, the MMPI became the MMPI-2 as a result of a major restandardization project that was undertaken to develop an entirely new set of normative data representing current population characteristics; the restandardization produced an extremely large normative database that included a wide range of clinical and non-clinical samples; psychometric characteristics of the Clinical Scales were not addressed at that time
• In 2003, the Restructured Clinical Scales were added to the published MMPI-2, representing a major psychometric reconstruction of the original Clinical Scales; this project was designed to address known psychometric flaws in the original Clinical Scales that unnecessarily complicated their interpretability and validity, but could not be addressed at the same time as the restandardization process took place Restructuring the Clinical Scales to was the initial step toward addressing the remaining psychometric and theoretical problems of the MMPI-2, but it meant that fixing problems related to individual test item content (e.g., antiquated vocabulary) had to be delayed until after the restructuring process was completed.
• In 2008, the MMPI-2-RF (Restructured Form) was published after nearly two decades of extensive efforts to psychometrically and theoretically fine tune the measure The MMPI-2-RF was built using the Restructured Clinical (RC) Scales as its foundation. The rest of the measure was developed utilizing sophisticated statistical analysis techniques that produced the RC Scales as well as theoretically based measure development methods to inform the overall measure reorganization. The entire measure reconstruction was accomplished using the original 567 items contained in the MMPI-2. The MMPI-2 Restandardization norms were used to validate the MMPI-2-RF; over 53,000 correlations based on more than 600 reference criteria are available in the MMPI-2-RF Technical Manual for the purpose of comparing the validity and reliability of MMPI-2-RF scales with those of the MMPI-2 The MMPI has been considered the gold standard in personality testing ever since its inception as an adult measure of psychopathology and personality structure in 1939. Many additions and changes to the measure have been made over time, including the addition of dozens of supplemental, validity, and other content scales to improve interpretability of the original Clinical Scales, changes in the number of items in the measure, and other adjustments. The most historically significant developmental changes include:

The MMPI-2-RF is a streamlined measure. Retaining only 338 of the original 567 items, its hierarchical scale structure provides non-redundant information across 51 scales that are easily interpretable. Validity Scales were retained (revised), two new Validity Scales have been added (Fs in 2008 and RBS in 2011), and there are new scales that capture somatic complaints. All of the MMPI-2-RF's scales demonstrate either increased or equivalent construct and criterion validity compared to their MMPI-2 counterparts

Current versions of the test (MMPI-2 and MMPI-2-RF) can be completed on optical scan forms or administered directly to individuals on the computer. Computer scoring is available and highly recommended over hand-scoring to reduce scoring errors. Computer scoring programs for the MMPI-2 (567 items) and MMPI-2-RF (338 items) are licensed by the University of Minnesota Press to Pearson Assessments and other companies located in different countries. The computer scoring programs provide a range of scoring profile choices. The MMPI-2 can generate a Score Report or an Extended Score Report, which includes the Restructured Clinical Scales from which the Restructured Form was later developed. The MMPI-2 Extended Score Report includes scores on the Original Clinical Scales as well as Content, Supplementary, and other subscales of potential interest to clinicians. The MMPI-2-RF computer scoring offers an option for the administrator to select a specific reference group with which to contrast and compare an individual's obtained scores; comparison groups include clinical, non-clinical, medical, forensic, and pre-employment settings, to name a few. The newest version of the Pearson Q-Local computer scoring program offers the option of converting MMPI-2 data into MMPI-2-RF reports as well as numerous other new features. Use of the MMPI is tightly controlled for ethical and financial reasons. Any clinician using the MMPI is required to meet specific test publisher requirements in terms of training and experience, must pay for all administration materials including the annual computer scoring license and is charged for each report generated by computer.