Clinical Validity of Inventário Dimensional Clínico da Personalidade

• Grant number: 12/11934-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2012
• End date: August 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Fundamentals and Assessments in Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Primi
• Grantee: André Augusto Rossi
• Host Institution: Universidade São Francisco (USF). Campus Itatiba. Itatiba , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The assessment of personality traits has been considered essential for various applications in psychology and their results have been weighted to the development of hypotheses about the psychological functioning of individuals or groups in different contexts. Despite the recognized importance of the construct and the use of instruments for evaluation, it is clear that there are a few studies that seek evidence for the validity of personality tests and the inferences drawn from their results. Moreover, currently there is a strong emphasis on nomothetic or psychometric approaches considered fundamentally concerned with the scientific rigor and take into account personality traits between individuals. However, within an overall classification of a group that is nomothetic there are special cases in which the rule cannot be applied. Because of this, there is a need to explore the idiographic or clinic perspective, in order to apply methods of analysis focused on the subject or their profiles. Thus, this project aims to develop studies focusing on the construction, validation and standardization of instruments for personality assessment based on dimensional models. The main focus of these studies is the development and improvement of dimensional instruments of personality assessment, applying methods of analysis based on the Item Response Theory and investigating the benefits of these resources in improving the analytical measurement. It also aims to study the relationship among these measures and among other variables focusing on both the validation of theoretical models on the structure and dynamics of personality on the applicability in different contexts. Therefore, this project will use the SWAP-200 instrument with IDCP instrument to perform a study of the clinical validity of the IDCP, comparing the results of two tests in a clinical setting, in an attempt to integrate the two approaches (nomothetic and idiographic) on personality assessment.