The Personality Inventory for Youth: Validity and comparability of Englishand Spanish versions for regular education and juvenile justice samples

In this study we examined the comparability of the Personality Inventory fo r Youth (PIY; Lachar & Gruber, 1993, 1995)Spanish version to its English co unterpart among bilingual Mexican American male and female high school stud ents (n = 120), and among incarcerated bilingual Mexican American male adol escents (n = 52). Results indicated that language (English vs. Spanish) was not associated with a significant effect on the PIY scales or subscales fo r male adolescents in the juvenile justice facility, but was associated wit h a marginal effect for regular education adolescents; more specifically, r egular education students completing the PIY in Spanish reported somewhat l ower levels of symptoms than those completing the English version. Also, in carcerated males obtained significantly higher scores than regular educatio n males on all 9 clinical and 19 out of 24 clinical subscales. Overall, the results of this study suggest that both language versions of the PIY may b e applied usefully in the study and treatment of a variety of problems rele vant to juvenile populations. Additional findings are discussed.