LATENT STRUCTURE OF DSM-III-R AXIS II PSYCHOPATHOLOGY IN A NORMAL SAMPLE

The Personality Disorder Examination was administered to 302 normal co ntrols in the New York High-Risk Project in order to elicit Axis II di agnoses (revised 3rd edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: American Psychiatric Association, 1987) and quant itative dimensions of psychopathology. LISREL confirmatory factor anal ysis was used to evaluate the Axis II hypothesis of 3 orthogonal facto rs. There was considerable overlap among personality disorders. The be st fitting LISREL model was of 3 oblique factors that were different f or male and female subjects. Given that our choice of variables to con strain in order to mathematically identify our models was partially ba sed on analysis of intercorrelations in our data set, our methods were not purely confirmatory. We present our results not to confirm specif ic hypotheses but to generate explicit hypotheses that can be tested i n independent samples.