Personality Assessment Inventory

Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), authored by Leslie Morey (1991, 2007), PhD, is a self-report 344-item personality test that assesses a respondent's personality and psychopathology. Each item is a statement about the respondent that the respondent rates with a 4-point scale (1-"Not true at all, False", 2-"Slightly true", 3-"Mainly true", and 4-"Very true"). It is used in various contexts, including psychotherapy, crisis/evaluation, forensic, personnel selection, pain/medical, and child custody assessment. The test construction strategy for the PAI was primarily deductive and rational. It shows good convergent validity with other personality tests, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Revised NEO Personality Inventory.

The PAI has 22 non-overlapping scales of four varieties: 1) validity scales, 2) clinical scales, 3) treatment consideration scales, and 4) interpersonal scales.

The validity scales measure the respondent's overall approach to the test, including faking good or bad, exaggeration, defensiveness, carelessness, or random responding.

The clinical scales measure the respondent's psychopathology using diagnostic categories that were judged by the developers to be relevant based on their historical and contemporary popularity among psychologists. Each clinical scale (except Alcohol Problems and Drug Problems) represents a particular trait, and each scale has sub-scales that represent more specific aspects of that trait.

The treatment consideration scales measure factors that may relate to treatment of clinical disorders or other risk factors but which are not captured in psychiatric diagnoses.

The interpersonal scales measure two factors that affect interpersonal functioning for the respondent. They are based on the circumplex model of emotion classification.

The rationale behind the development of the PAI was to create an assessment tool that would enable the measurement of psychological concepts while maintaining statistical strength. The development methodology was based on several advances that the field of personality assessment was witnessing at the time. Due to the fuzzy nature of constructs (concepts) in psychology, it is very difficult to use criterion-referenced approaches, such as those used in some parts of medicine (e.g. pregnancy tests). This is why construct validation is very important to personality test development. It is usually described as being involved when tests intend to measure some construct that is not "operationally defined". The PAI was developed because the authors of the instrument felt that there were a limited number of self-report questionnaires that were using this type of construct validation method to assess areas relevant to diagnoses and treatment planning.

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