What do the MMPI-2 restructured clinical scales reliably measure? Answers from multiple research settings

The Restructured Clinical (RC; Tellegen et al., 2003) scales were developed to improve measurement of the core constructs of the MMPI-2 (Butcher et al., 2001) Clinical scales by removing "demoralization," hypothesized to affect these scales adversely. Using 25 samples with MMPI-2 responses from 78,159 subjects across diverse clinical settings, we found that each RC scale was highly correlated with a Supplementary, Content, or Personality Psychopathology 5 (PSY-5; Harkness, McNulty, & Ben-Porath, 1995) scale: higher, in fact, than the correlation between the RC scale and its parent scale. Furthermore, for over half the RC scales (i.e., RC1, RC3, RC7, RC8, and RCd), the correlations were strong enough to conclude that the RC scales replicate MMPI-2 scales with rich empirical foundations; the remaining RC scales were not redundant. Next, we examined reliability estimates using alpha coefficients and interitem correlations and did not reveal superior reliability for most of the RC scales over existing MMPI-2 scales.