Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI)

Personality Assessment Inventory™ (PAI®) Leslie C. Morey, PhD

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  Purpose: 22 nonoverlapping full scales provide a comprehensive assessment of adult psychopathology


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  Age Range: Adult, Elder Adult


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  Adminitration: Individual


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  Time: 50-60 minutes to administer; 15-20 minutes to score

This objective inventory of adult personality assesses psychopathological syndromes and provides information relevant for clinical diagnosis, treatment planning, and screening for psychopathology. Since it was first introduced in 1991, the PAI has been heralded as one of the most important innovations in the field of clinical assessment.

The 344 items constitute 22 nonoverlapping full scales covering the constructs most relevant to a broad-based assessment of mental disorders: 5 validity scales, 11 clinical scales, 5 treatment scales, and 2 interpersonal scales. To facilitate interpretation and to cover the full range of complex clinical constructs, 10 full scales contain conceptually derived subscales.

No Scoring Keys Needed…

Clients 18 years and older with 4th-grade reading skills can usually complete the PAI in less than 1 hour, rating each of the 344 items on a 4-point scale ranging from False, Not At All True, to Very True. Responses are entered on a 2-part carbonless Answer Sheet. The bottom page of the Answer Sheet provides scores for all 344 items. Full scales and subscales can be scored in only 15-20 minutes.

For situations where no desk or tabletop is available, the PAI Administration Folio holds both the Item Booklet and Answer Sheet and provides a hard surface so your clients can easily complete the inventory.

To provide interpretation relative to the standardization sample of 1,000 community-dwelling adults, PAI scale and subscale raw scores are translated to T scores. Transformed T scores have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10, so that T-score values greater than 50 lie above the mean in comparison to scores of individuals in the standardization sample. Therefore, T scores greater than or equal to 70 (2 standard deviations above the mean) will quickly alert you to a pronounced deviation from typical responses of adults in the normative sample. PAI Profile Forms allow you to rapidly translate raw scores to T scores and plot the pattern of test results. The Adult Profile Form also contains a blue line demarcating the distribution of scores for a large sample of clinical cases. This feature facilitates comparison of an individual\’s scores with those in the clinical sample.

The Critical Items Form (CIF) lists 27 items (distributed across seven content areas) that suggest behavior or psychopathology that may demand immediate attention.

Reliability/Validity

Reliability and validity are based on data from a U.S. census-matched normative sample of 1,000 community-dwelling adults (matched on the basis of gender, race, and age), a sample of 1,265 patients from 69 clinical sites, and a college sample of 1,051 students.

Because the PAI was normed on adults in a variety of clinical and community settings, profiles can be compared with both normal and clinical populations. Combined-sex normative data are provided. Reliability studies indicate that the PAI has a high degree of internal consistency across samples: results are stable over periods of 2-4 weeks (median alphas and test-retest correlations exceed .80 for the 22 full scales). Validity studies demonstrate convergent and discriminant validity with more than 50 other measures of psychopathology.

PAI Comprehensive Kit includes PAI Professional Manual, 2 Reusable Item Booklets, 2 Administration Folios, 25 Form HS [Hand-Scorable] Answer Sheets, 25 Adult Profile Forms, and 25 Critical Items Forms.