The Development of the Items-Easy (Ie) and Items-Difficult (Id) Subscales for the MMPI-A

Abstract

This research involves the development, validation, and cross-validation of the Items-Easy (Ie) and Items-Difficult (Id) subscales for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A; Butcher et al., 1992). These subscales were designed to assess the degree to which reading comprehension deficits may be responsible for significant elevations of validity Scale F and the standard clinical scales on adolescents' MMPI-A profiles. A difference score, bared on the two 13-item subscales, was created in order to compare subjects' responses to subsets of the more comprehensible (Ie) and less comprehensible (Id) items within the test. Hit rate, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive power, and negative predictive power were calculated on the basis of simple (Id - Ie) and weighted (3Id - 1Ie) difference scores for the validation (N = 495) and cross-validation (N = 264) samples, and for specific high-F profile subsamples. Although some of the indices reflected classification accuracy as high as 95%, none of the indices yielded consistently high results across the various samples and subsamples. It has been concluded that the Ie and Id subscales should be used only for research purposes at this time.

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