Construction of item-level scales from the Personality Assessment Inventory to assess levels of personality functioning.

Abstract

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) introduced the clinician-rated Levels of Personality Functioning Scale (LPFS) as an indicator of general personality functioning based on four elements: Identity, Self-Direction, Empathy, and Intimacy. Construct validation strategies were employed to select and evaluate items from the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 2007) to measure the four elements of the LPFS. In Study 1, conceptual ratings of PAI items produced lists of candidate items for the four elements. In Study 2, a sample of student respondents (n = 312) was used to select the final items for the PAI-Levels of Personality Functioning (PAI-LPF). In Study 3, a large sample of adults (n = 505) gathered using Amazon's Mechanical Turk was used to cross-validate the psychometric properties of the PAI-LPF element scales. Means, standard deviations, and coefficient alpha values are reported for the PAI-LPF total score and element scales using the PAI community adult and clinical patient normative samples. The PAI-LPF offers clinicians and researchers the ability to include the LPFS as part of a comprehensive assessment of personality and psychopathology offered by the PAI. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).