Evaluation of an MMPI--a short form: implications for adaptive testing

Efforts to develop a viable short form of the MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943) span more than 50 years, with more recent attempts to significantly shorten the item pool focused on the use of adaptive computerized test administration. In this article, we report some psychometric properties of an MMPI-Adolescent version (MMPI-A; Butcher et al., 1992) short form based on administration of the first 150 items of this test instrument. We report results for both the MMPI-A normative sample of 1,620 adolescents and a clinical sample of 565 adolescents in a variety of treatment settings. We summarize results for the MMPI-A basic scales in terms of Pearson product-moment correlations generated between full administration and short-form administration formats and mean Tscore elevations for the basic scales generated by each approach. In this investigation, we also examined single-scale and 2-point congruences found for the MMPI-A basic clinical scales as derived from standard and short-form administrations. We present the relative strengths and weaknesses of the MMPI-A short form and discuss the findings in terms of implications for attempts to shorten the item pool through the use of computerized adaptive assessment approaches.