Are Critical Items "Critical" for the MMPI-A

Abstract

This article examines one aspect of the potential usefulness of critical items to the: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory -Adolescent (MMPI-A). Endorsement frequency data are presented on the Koss-Butcher (1973) and the Lachar-Wrobeli (1979) critical items for Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) adult normative and clinical samples and for MMPI-A adolescent normative and clinical samples. Adolescents in both normal and clinical samples endorse critical items with a higher frequency than do normal adults. Further, results demonstrated that significant differences were uniformly found between the endorsement frequencies for normative versus clinical subjects for the MMPI-2 samples, whereas similar comparisons for the MMPI-A samples typically showed that adolescents in clinical setting did not endorse critical items more frequently than normal adolescents. These findings indicate that it may be difficult to construct critical item lists for adolescents based on the type of empirical methodology used with adults in which items are selected based on endorsement frequency differences found between comparison group. Beyond the issue of the technical difficulty in creating a critical item list for adolescents, several conceptual concerns are raised regarding the application of critical items to the MMPI-A. It was noted that the concept of "critical items" has not been we11 defined, and both the reliability and validity of critical items may be limited in adolescent populations.