Assessing the Misrepresentation of Health Problems

Abstract

Although respondent misrepresentation in many areas of psychological testing has been widely studied, little is available for evaluating misrepresentation during health-related psychological assessments. In this article, I report the empirical development and validation of such scales for 2 screening inventories: the Psychological Screening Inventory (the HPO scale; Lanyon, 1970, 1978) and the Multidimensional Health Profile (the HPE scale; Ruehlman, Lanyon, & Karoly, 1998a, 1998b, 1999). In each case, judges were asked to simulate the misrepresentation of health problems. Items were selected whose frequencies differed from normal responding; these items were screened for marked content irrelevance and further refined using data from additional respondents. Validation data showed that for both scales the group means for persons with genuine health problems were up to 1 SD above the normative mean, and the means for suspected and actual simulators were about 2 SDs higher than the health-problem groups.

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