Psychometric Stability of Rewritten MMPI Items

The current form of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) has been in use for over 50 years with no revisions in its item content or wording. As part of the MMPI Restandardization Project (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer 1989), 82 of the original items were rewritten. Subjects in this study were administered either the original booklet twice to serve as a baseline or the original and the experimental form (MMPI-AX) in a counterbalanced order. Comparisons were made between the percentage of subjects who responded similarly to the two administrations of the original items and the percentage of subjects responding similarly to the original and rewritten versions of the items. Of the 82 items, only 9 changed significantly and only for one gender. None of the correlations between these 9 items and the MMPI validity, clinical, or special scales they are scored on changed significantly for the rewritten items as compared with the original items.