Comparison of three multiscale inventories in identifying the presence of psychopathological symptoms

Two new multiscale inventories, the Basic Personality Inventory (BPI) and Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI), assess the domain of psychopathology. Both use modern principles of test construction that arose over the years since the introduction of the MMPI. These three tests were compared in terms of their ability to discriminate between the presence and absence of 11 symptoms of psychopathology. Symptoms used in the analysis were extracted from medical records and showed interrater reliabilities ranging from kappa = .412 to 1.00. All symptoms had incidences of at least 15% in the sample of 107 psychiatric inpatients used. The MMPI was scored for both clinical and Wiggins content scales. Parallel discriminant analyses were performed for each set of test scores for the presence or absence of each symptom. A conservative alpha level was adopted, and results favored the Basic Personality Inventory.