What Do the MMPI–2 Restructured Clinical Scales Reliably Measure? Answers From Multiple Research Settings

The Restructured Clinical (RC; Tellegen et al., 2003 Tellegen, A., Ben-Porath, Y. S., McNulty, J., Arbisi, P., Graham, J. R. and Kaemmer, B. 2003. MMPI–2: Restructured Clinical (RC) scales, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]) scales were developed to improve measurement of the core constructs of the MMPI–2 (Butcher et al., 2001 Butcher, J. N., Graham, J. R., Ben-Porath, Y. S., Tellegen, Y. S., Dahlstrom, W. G. and Kaemmer, B. 2001. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory–2: Manual for administration and scoring, , Rev. ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]) Clinical scales by removing “demoralization,” hypothesized to affect these scales adversely. Using 25 samples with MMPI–2 responses from 78,159 subjects across diverse clinical settings, we found that each RC scale was highly correlated with a Supplementary, Content, or Personality Psychopathology 5 (PSY–5; Harkness, McNulty, & Ben-Porath, 1995 Harkness, A. R., McNulty, J. L. and Ben-Porath, Y. S. 1995. The Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY–5): Constructs and MMPI–2 scales. Psychological Assessment, 7: 104–114. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) scale: higher, in fact, than the correlation between the RC scale and its parent scale. Furthermore, for over half the RC scales (i.e., RC1, RC3, RC7, RC8, and RCd), the correlations were strong enough to conclude that the RC scales replicate MMPI–2 scales with rich empirical foundations; the remaining RC scales were not redundant. Next, we examined reliability estimates using alpha coefficients and interitem correlations and did not reveal superior reliability for most of the RC scales over existing MMPI–2 scales.