Personality Assessment Inventory

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The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is a 344 question test of psychological functioning. It compares a person's responses to those from large community and clinical normative samples on a variety of constructs relevant to the assessment of personality and psychopathology. It contains four kinds of scales: 1) validity scales, which measure the respondent's approach to the test, including faking good or bad, exaggeration, or defensiveness, 2) clinical scales, which correspond to psychiatric diagnostic categories, 3) treatment consideration scales, which assess factors that may relate to treatment of clinical disorders or other risk factors but which are not captured in psychiatric diagnoses, and 4) interpersonal scales, which provide indicators of interpersonal dimensions of personality functioning.

The PAI is one of the fastest growing multi-scale self-report measures of personality and psychopathology in terms of both accumulating research and use for several reasons. These include practical factors such as its relative brevity, 4-point likert scaling, and relatively low reading level. It also includes psychometric factors, such as enhanced content and discriminant validity relative to other scales, the provision of both community and clinical norm groups, and its correspondence to a set of constructs that are widely considered important by professionals regardless of their theoretical orientation.

[edit] See also

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
• NEO-PI
• 16PF Personality Questionnaire
• MBTI
• Morey Personality Assessment Inventory