Empirical Evidence for a Four Factor Framework of Personality Disorder Organization: Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory—III Personality Disorder Scales Across Belgian and Danish Data Samples

Abstract

The factor structure of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III (Millon, Millon, Davis, & Grossman, 2006) personality disorder scales was analyzed using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis on data obtained from a Danish (N = 2030) and a Belgian (N = 1210) sample. Two-, three-, and four factor models, a priori specified using structures found by Dyce, O'Connor, Parkins, and Janzen (1997), were fitted to the data. The best fitting model was a four factor structure (RMSEA = .066, GFI = .98, CFI = .93) with partially invariant factor loadings. The robustness of this four-factor model clearly supports the efforts to organize future personality disorder description in a four-factor framework by corroborating four domains that were predominant in dimensional models (Widiger & Simonsen, 2005): Factor 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively corresponded to emotional dysregulation versus stability, antagonism versus compliance, extraversion versus introversion, and constraint versus impulsivity.