ABSTRACT
Questionnaire-based methods of assessing adolescents require careful attention to issues of the adolescent’s capacity to provide an accurate self-report and the adequacy of the assessment instrument in providing reliable and valid measurement of psychological functioning during this developmental period. There are relatively few self-report personality measures available for use with adolescents, perhaps in part because of the constraints related to reading/ comprehension ability, cognitive/affective developmental status, and motivational level of adolescents in clinical settings. Currently available measures include the Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory (MACI; Millon, 1993) and the Adolescent Psychopathology Scale (APS; Reynolds, 1998), and an adolescent version of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI-A) is currently under development (Morey, 2000). By a large margin, however, the most widely used self-report measure of adolescents’ functioning is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A).Responding to a self-report personality inventory requires some capacity for self-reflection and abstract thinking. Adolescence is a time of rapid cognitive development and, in Piagetian (1975) terms, is the period during which most individuals shift from Concrete Operations to the Formal Operations stage. As this shift occurs, the adolescent acquires the ability to manipulate ideas and concepts, changes that facilitate the adolescent’s ability to respond accurately to a self-report personality inventory (Archer, 2005). 237
In the development of a self-report assessment instrument for adolescents, the reading level of the items is of particular concern. An adolescent’s inability to understand items may lead to frustration, inaccurate responses, or omitted items, all of which can jeopardize the validity of test results. There are a number of standardized methods for assessing the reading level of items (for example, computer programs to evaluate item difficulty based on number of syllables per word and number of words per sentence), and the items must be carefully scrutinized in this regard during test development. In addition, the reading level of the individual adolescent test taker must be determined before administration and specifically evaluated with the use of a standardized reading test when deemed necessary.Finally, it is essential that an adolescent self-report personality inventory use an appropriate item pool to provide adequate content validity. Items must be appropriate to contemporary adolescent experience, as well as to the types of psychopathology and behavior problems most commonly seen in adolescents, such as eating disorders, substance abuse, and problems related to school and family. Likewise, test content should not include areas that are unlikely to be of concern to most adolescents, such as problems with an employer or chronic marital discord.The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and its successor, the MMPI-2, have long been among the most popular assessment instruments for use with adults (e.g., Piotrowski & Keller, 1989). Although the original MMPI was commonly used with adolescents (Archer, Maruish, Imhof, & Piotrowski, 1991), a number of concerns about its appropriateness for use with this population emerged gradually in the late 1970s and 1980s. In order to adequately address issues such as those discussed above, an adolescent form of the MMPI was developed and was eventually introduced as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A: Butcher et al., 1992).
