Temporal stability and dynamic convergence of the Personality Assessment Screener in a prison sample

Although the Personality Assessment Screener (PAS; Morey, 1997) has garnered substantial research interest, the measure's temporal stability and sensitivity to change have remained largely uninvestigated. The present study employs a dynamic approach to investigating the convergent and discriminant validity of the PAS by examining relationships between temporal changes on the PAS and changes on external criterion measures, thereby exploring the extent to which changes on the PAS offer meaningful information regarding changes in psychological functioning. Data were obtained from a public dataset funded by the United States Department of Justice in which male inmates were administered various psychological measures at 5 time points spanning the course of a year. The PAS demonstrated appreciable stability across all testing intervals and the full study period, and temporal changes on the PAS correlated as expected with changes on both conceptually similar and distinct external criterion measures. These findings offer evidence to suggest that temporal variations across testing intervals are not fully explained by error, as conceptualized in classical test-retest analyses, but rather may indicate meaningful changes in functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).