Evaluation of an MMPI - A short form: Implications for adaptive testing

Efforts to develop a viable short form of the MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 19 43) span more than 50 years, with more recent attempts to significantly sho rten the item pool focused on the use of adaptive computerized test adminis tration. In this article, we report some psychometric properties of an MMPI -Adolescent version (MMPI-A; Butcher et al., 1992) short form based on admi nistration of the first 150 items of this test instrument. We report result s 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 corr elations generated between full administration and short-form administratio n formats and mean T score elevations for the basic scales generated by eac h approach. In this investigation, we also examined single-scale and 2-poin t congruences found for the MMPI-A basic clinical scales as derived from st andard and short-form administrations. We present the relative strengths an d 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 compu terized adaptive assessment approaches.