
It is primarily intended to test people who are suspected of having mental health or other clinical issues. This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia ( view authors).The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory ( MMPI) is a psychological test that assesses personality traits and psychopathology.
The Straight Dope: What does Alice in Wonderland have to do with psychological testing?. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Home Page. Test interpretation and description of scales (pdf). MMPI-A (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent). Pearson Assessments: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2. The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. "Against types." Boston Globe, 12 September 2004. The Use of Integrity Tests for Pre-Employment Screening. Congress of the United States Office of Technology Assessment. Numerous successful lawsuits have argued that giving the test to job applicants is an invasion of privacy, and that there is no evidence linking test results to job performance. Ervin's bill failed.Īnnie Murphy Paul, a former senior editor of Psychology Today, charges that personality tests "are often invalid, unreliable, and unfair." Others have accused that MMPI can "overpathologize" certain demographic groups, notably teenagers and non-white test takers. In 1966, Senator Ervin introduced a bill to sharply curtail the government's use of the MMPI and similar tests, comparing them to McCarthyism. The reactions of the press and public were very critical of the types of questions asked on these psychological tests. The Subcommittees also investigated the validity of these tests and the due process issues involved in test administration. Gallagher, held hearings to determine whether the questions asked on psychological tests used by the Federal Government were an unjustified invasion of the respondent’s psyche and private life. In 1965 the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, and the House Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy of the Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Representative Cornelius E.
Whyte was among many who saw the tests as helping to create and perpetuate the oppressive groupthink of mid-century corporate capitalism.Ī 1990 Office of Technology Assessment report noted: Personality tests like graphology, Rorschach inkblot test, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator have come under fire more often than MMPI, but critics have raised issues about the ethics and validity of administering MMPI, especially for non-clinical uses.īy the 1960s, the MMPI was being given by companies to employees and applicants as often as to psychiatric patients.
Support for college and career counseling. Evaluation of participants in substance abuse programs.
Assessment of medical patients and design of effective treatment strategies, including chronic pain management. Identification of suitable candidates for high-risk public safety positions such as nuclear power plant workers, police officers, airline pilots, medical and psychology students, firefighters and seminary students. Evaluation of disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, clinical depression and schizophrenia. The MMPI has been used for a range of assessments: Norms are published based on a sample of 2600 people of diverse ages from a variety of backgrounds. There is also a version of the inventory for adolescents age 14 to 18, the MMPI-A. There is a short form of the test that is comprised of the first 370 items on the long-form MMPI-2.
The MMPI-2 has 567 items, or questions, and takes approximately 60 to 90 minutes to complete. The current standardized version for adults 18 and over, the MMPI-2, was released in 1989, with a subsequent revision of certain test elements in early 2001. The MMPI is copyrighted and is a trademark of the University of Minnesota : Clinicians must pay a fee each time it is administered. The original authors of the MMPI were Starke R. The original MMPI was developed at the University of Minnesota Hospitals and first published in 1942.