Psychology faculty, students work to update personality tests
Faculty and students are leading efforts to modernize and diversify personality and psychopathology standardized tests for adults.
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was published in 1943 by researchers at the University of Minnesota Press, and is used to develop treatment plans, assist with differential diagnosis, help answer legal questions and screen job candidates.
Professor Kyunhee Han, director of the experimental psychology training program at Central Michigan University, spent most of her career translating various forms of the test into the Korean language. Her translations are the only Korean versions of the test recognized by researchers.
The ultimate goal of Han's work is to achieve "measurement equivalence," statistical property of measurement that indicates that the same thing is being measured across some specified groups, despite the language barrier.
Her work was published by the South Korean publisher Maumsarang. Han first began working with the MMPI test in 1987 as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota Press.
"There are many steps to the publishing process," Han said. "I wanted it to be available for everyone to use for treatment."
The test’s most recent form, the MMPI 2 RF, remains the most popular personality inventory. The original MMPI had irrelevant criteria for personality testing, such as sexist, archaic and sentimental language.
"One item asked you if you liked to play 'drop the handkerchief,' and nobody knows what that means anymore," said Nathan Weed, a clinical psychologist working in MMPI research. "It is unethical to use irrelevant tools as a researcher."
The MMPI 2, published in 1989, was the culmination of a series of changes to the original test, which was no longer relevant to the growing field of psychology. The MMPI 2 RF was developed in 2008 and lowered the number of inventory items from 567 to 338. The MMPI Adolescent model was released in 1992 to address the psychological condition of youth 13-18 years of age.
Seth Courrege, a third-year graduate student working for Weed, believes the MMPI 2 RF could be improved. He is currently experimenting with the effects of increasing the number of potential answers from a true/false format to one of four choices.
"There are always improvements to be made," Courrege said.
Students work directly with staff in researching the many aspects of the MMPI. Jiebing Wang, a third-year graduate student working with Han, has begun working on translations of her own.
"My research is focused on the cross-cultural translation of the MMPI," Wang said. "I focus on measuring statistics of American and Korean samples."
Wang said other personality tests could be beneficial to students.
"Most kids in college don't know which major to choose and personality tests can help with that," she said.
The test is commonly used in both inpatient and outpatient settings, in prison systems, employment screenings and is often a pretext for clinical psychology work.
"It doesn't get used like a Facebook quiz," Weed said. "It is a tool of serious psychopathology work."
