The Personality Assessment Inventory

Abstract

Introduction
The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Morey, 1991) is a self-report inventory intended to provide clinically useful information about a host of important client variables in professional and research settings. It contains 344 items that are answered on a four-alternative scale, with the options of totally false, slightly true, mainly true, and very true. The 344 items comprise 22 nonoverlapping full scales: 4 validity, 11 clinical, 5 treatment consideration, and 2 interpersonal. Ten of the full scales include subscales that facilitate the assessment of the breadth of measured constructs. Several additional indicators are also available to augment PAI interpretation (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2 for PAI scales and indexes). This chapter provides a brief overview of the theory and procedures employed in developing the PAI and highlights relevant research and practical applications of the PAI in a variety of assessment contexts. More detailed discussion is available in primary sources (Morey, 1996, 2003, 2007; Morey & Hopwood, 2007).