A substantial psychometric analysis of the scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: F. B. Berezin’s version, the MMIL

Abstract

The MMPI is a test questionnaire that is extremely popular among not only domestic but also foreign experts. The classic version of the MMPI questionnaire was offered by S. Hathaway and J. McKinley in 1940. Since then reworked and reduced versions of the questionnaire have been repeatedly offered. In 1989 the questionnaire was considerably redesigned (the restandardization project began in 1982) and was published under the name MMPI-2 (J. Butcher et al., 1989).Adaptation of the questionnaire in our country began in the 1960s. The first MMIL version consisted of 384 statements by Berezin & Miroshnikov in 1967. Berezin and his colleagues developed an original interpretation of the MMPI scales and carried out a careful standardization and adaptation, taking into account the specifics of sociocultural conditions, the possibilities of applying the test to mentally healthy people, and also the use of the reduced version of the test. As a result, the MMIL was created (Berezin, Miroshnikov, & Rozhanec, 1976, 1994). The MMIL was used in this research.Today there is wide circulation of other domestic versions of the questionnaire: the Standardized Method for the Multivariate Study of Personality (SMIL) (Sobchik, 2007), the Standardized Clinical Personal Questionnaire (SKLO) (M. Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg), and Mini-Mult, which consists of 71 statements selected on the basis of factorial analysis, created by Zaytsev and his colleagues (Zaytsev,1981).Since the standardization and adaptation of the MMIL there have been significant changes in the political, economic, and spiritual spheres of the Russianspeaking culture; these alterations have caused extensive changes in the personal, axiological, semantic, motivational, and behavioral spheres of the Russian people. Therefore, the relevance of the present research is explained by the necessity of reassessing the psychometric indicators of the MMPI to reflect precisely the actual semantic structures of people surveyed in specific sociocultural conditions. The question of how test points are structured is also important as features of this structure reflect the psychological reality that the test is expected to measure. Attempts to apply factor and cluster analyses of MMIL points have been undertaken previously. From our point of view, these methods look most suitable for modeling the psychological reality measured by the MMPI. In particular, one of the most convincing studies was carried out by Shmelev in 2000 (Shmelev, 2002) on a sample of 766 people (students of Moscow colleges and universities). So we were curious to find out what our results in 2009 would be. One of our objectives was to compare the results of the above-mentioned study with those obtained almost 10 years later.Experiment 1. Psychometric analysis of the MMPIIt was necessary to carry out a psychometric analysis of the questionnaire in order to check the reliability, coherence, and internal and external validity of the technique. For that reason we examined the following psychometric indicators of the MMPI test: medians of root-mean-square deviations on each of the test scales and on female and male samples separately, indicators on the one-sample KolmogorovSmirnov criterion, correlations between answers to questions and the total points on a scale, and Cronbach's alpha coefficient values.Methodology1. Creation of linear norms for the test. Medians and root-mean-square deviations were calculated for each of the test scales, for female and male samples separately. Medians and root-mean-square deviations obtained in 1977 for each of the test scales for female and male samples by Berezin, were compared with our 2009 results.2. Check on normality and the assessment of the distribution of points. A check of the sample and the distribution of test points were estimated visually according to the charts of distribution and analytically considering the results of the one-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov criterion. …