Psychometric Stability of MMPI-A Item Modifications

The 478-item Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A) is a revision of the original test instrument for use in the assessment of adolescents. As part of the MMPI-A development, process, 70 items were modified from their appearance in the original test instrument to eliminate obsolete or sexist language, reduce awkward phrasing, increase item clarity, or improve item relevancy to adolescents' life experiences. If these modifications in the original item pool resulted in substantial differences in the frequency of respondents' endorsements of these lest items, such differences could pose a threat to the generalizability of research findings from the original form of the MMPI to the MMPI-A. This study examined the psychometric stability of modified items by comparing item endorsement frequency and item test-retest correlations in a group of 265 adolescents evaluated in repeated administrations design. Results of item analyses indicate that item modifications designed to improve the content or grammatical structure of these 70 items did not result in significant changes in response patterns.