A brief screening scale for psychopathological patients developed from MMPI score-patterning

Abstract

A major problem for many general hospitals is identifying those patients on admission who are in as much need for psychiatric treatment as they are for medical and surgical procedures. This article presents a scale of items which was developed to identify such patients with a minimum of error in just such settings. Its efficiency may originate in the unique manner in which the items were derived. The criterion group was obtained by searching for a specific pattern of scores on the MMPI. METHODThe means and standard deviations for the ten MMPI clinical scales of a sample of 250 male psychiatric patients were obtained from R~s e n (~) .This sample represented a random selection from MMPI's which had been administered to all testable male patients on the Psychiatry Service of the VA Hospital, Ft. Snelling, Minn. Each of the 250 MMPI's was sorted to obtain those MMPI's whose Hs score came within plus and minus one standard deviation of the mean Hs score of the sample. The standard deviation used was that of the sample. Those MMPI's which were obtained were then sorted to find those whose D score fell within plus and minus one standard deviation of the mean D score. This procedure was carried out until only those MMPI's remained (52 in number) which best fitted the mean curve of the sample in that all their scores were within one standard deviation of the mean scores of the respective scales.Counts were made to obtain the percentages of true and false responses to the 550 MMPI items by the patients in the group of 52. This group will be referred to as the criterion group. These percentages were compared to those given in the normative tables for the MMPI('). The specific group used in the comparison ("V" in the tables) represented the answers of 139 normal males? Those items which showed a difference of 10% or more were tested in fourfold contingency tables. Those items which showed a difference with a probability less than .01 were compared to another group of normals ("XI") in the tables. This group consisted of 152 college males. Here again no percentages were available for ltems 1-41 through 5-40.Although this method is not a cross-validation because the criterion group was not split for the two comparisons, the level of significance held to and the e&ciency of the scale of items which resulted suggest that the greater part of those items present in the scale by chance were kept to a minimum.The first comparison resulted in 31 items occurring at the .01 level of significance or less. The second comparison had 25 remaining at that level.

Structured personality tests.

“…In spite of the attempts to utilize the MMPI in a highly objective fashion, some workers (58) report that they can predict traits more accurately by scanning clusters of scores on the MMPI than by using a rigorous objective method for the same purpose. Brief screening procedures (19,28,31,76) for psychopathological patients have been developed from the MMPI score patterning, and the test is frequently used for such screening. The experience of clinicians and investigators is contradictory insofar as the value of such scales is concerned.…”