I’m excited to head to my first APS conference to present some recent work by Sarah Hirsch and Megan Keen on the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) and efforts to map HiTop onto this instrument. We focused on military populations and used an EFA/CFA approach on distinct samples but examine how (and how well) these efforts apply to military service members.
We conducted a series of EFAs on a sample of active duty soldiers seen as part of a neuropsychological evaluation, then performed Goldberg’s (2006) Back-ackwards analysis to link observed factor structures in each EFA solution, up to the 7-factor model comprising the HiTop Sub-spectra. We were able to identify many of the Spectre-Sub-Spectra factors and the initial standardized loadings seemed to make good sense with the HiTop Model descriptions; however, diagnostic discrimination was not as clean as we may hoped and there were several unexpected correlations which were medium/large in magnitude, which suggest some inflated general inner correlation (reminding us of the CS7/CS8 correlation in the MMPI-2 prior to the creation of the restructured clinical (RC) scales).
Next up, we took a group of Veterans being evaluated as part of their intake process on an outpatient PTSD Clinical Team (PCT). We started with the initial EFA model, but failed to find good fit. Rather than follow EFA correlations as corrections, we evaluated from the bottom up on individual sub-spectra, trimming poorly fitted items/spectra. Our goal in taking these steps was to produce a replicable model with only strong, expected relationships, even if that means a model not fully congruent with HiTop. Avoiding dual loading indicators also ensures a more interpretable model since it maintains component independence.
You can download the posters by clicking here for the CFA or the EFA posters!
Dr. Paul Ingram, Ph.D 