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Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) - Subject Follow-up

This measure appears in the following time-points: Follow72.

Related Construct

Description of Measure

The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is an inventory of adult personality designed to provide information on critical clinical variables. The full PAI contains 344 items which comprise 22 non-overlapping scales. It is designed to be used with individuals from age 18 to adult. Two of the clinical scales (borderline and antisocial features) were administered one time to the Pathways study participants between the time of their 72-month and 84-month interviews. Study participant were an average age 21-22 at the time of administration.

The Borderline Features items focus on attributes indicative of a borderline personality, including unstable and fluctuating interpersonal relations, impulsivity, affective lability and instability, and uncontrolled anger. Subscales are: affective instability (BOR-A, 6 items), identify problems (BOR-I, 6 items), negative relationships (BOR-N, 6 items) and self harm (BOR-S, 6 items). The Antisocial Features items focus on a history of illegal acts and authority problems, egocentrism, lack of empathy and loyalty, instability and excitement-seeking. Subscales are: antisocial behaviors (ANT-A, 8 items), egocentricity (ANT-E, 8 items), and stimulus-seeking (ANT-S, 8 items). (Please refer to the "data issues" section regarding one item in the antisocial scale.)

Scoring of the PAI followed steps specified in the PAI Manual (with one exception, see next paragraph). Raw to T-score conversions were done using the conversion table (Table A-1 in the manual) derived from the census-matched standardization sample. The census-matched standardized sample is a subset of a group of 1,462 community-dwelling adults (age 18 or older) from both urban and rural settings in 12 states. A subset of 1,000 census-matched subjects were selected from the larger group on the basis of cross-stratification for the variables of gender, race and age. For most research purposes, the PAI manual (page 51) recommends the use of this conversion table rather than the conversion tables for particular subgroups (e.g. college students, blacks, or individuals over 60) because the influence of demographic variables (particularly gender and race) was fairly small and the normative data in table A-1 is drawn from a representative and larger sample size.

The PAI manual (page 11) recommends that the PAI results be used only if the validity subscales (inconsistency, infrequency, negative impression, positive impression) that are part of the full PAI are within an acceptable range. However, the Pathways study did not administer the validity subscales so we are not able to take the results of these subscales into consideration.

Interpreting raw subscale values:

Interpretation of borderline and antisocial scale T-scores:

Available scores include:

Data Issues

References