Comparative evaluation of two MMPI short forms with chemical abusing inpatients

Studied several novel analyses of the correspondence between two popular MMPI short forms and the full MMPI, including multivariate profile analyses and analyses of change scores. Pre- and posttreatment MMPIs were collected from 100 veterans in a treatment program for alcohol and drug problems. Scores for the Faschingbauer Abbreviated MMPI and the MMPI-168 were extracted from full MMPI protocols. Each short form was compared separately with the full form in several individual-case-oriented and group-data-oriented analyses. Significant differences between full and both short form profiles were found. It was concluded that neither short form is recommended for individual case descriptions, that significant problems arise in using these short forms for group descriptive or comparative research, and that these short forms show moderately acceptable correspondence with full MMPIs over time. It appears that short MMPIs continue to show serious deficits in reliability, i.e., in correspondence with full MMPIs, in spite of recent attempts to demonstrate validity somewhat independent of the full MMPI.