Abstract This chapter describes the history and development of self‐report inventories (SRIs) as measures of personality and psychopathology. Early criticisms of this technique are reviewed, with an emphasis on concerns regarding their susceptibility to distortion and limited empirical foundations for their interpretation. Current issues in SRI‐based assessment are then reviewed and discussed, including various approaches to constructing SRIs and their relative merits, approaches to and foundations for SRI interpretation including the merits of empirical and content‐based interpretation, and derivation of standard scores for SRI interpretation. Next, the concept of protocol validity is defined and threats to protocol validity, including content and non‐content‐based threats, are identified and discussed. These threats include nonresponding, random responding, fixed responding, overreporting, and underreporting. Finally, needs for further SRI research studies are identified. These include generating broader research bases to allow for a greater role for construct validity in SRI interpretation, the need to address questions regarding validity generalization in SRI interpretation, further research to clarify the potential role of configural SRI interpretation, and additional studies to guide efforts at detecting threats to protocol validity and their implications for SRI interpretation.
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