Million Clinical Multiaxial Inventory III

Psychologists have been using Million Clinical Multiaxial Inventory III (MCMI-III) to diagnose patients with personality disorders, but it has been questioned on its accuracy and fairness when it comes to gender differences. MCMI-III is mainly used for objective measuring of personality and psychopathology and it is stated that its works best on Axis II disorders.

Empirical evidence does not support MCMI-III with prevalence of personality disorders in men and women. MCMI-III uses base rate in its scoring system and base rate is the frequency or dominance of a characteristic in a particular population therefore the accuracy of the assessment measure can be affected. Raw scores are transformed in to base rate score for each scale. If raw score is 0 then the base rate is 0 however if the base rate is 60 then the raw score is at a median for that particular scale.

Not only does the MCMI-III evaluate Mental Health problems, more importantly, its strength is in determining underlying personality patterns that are essential to understanding and effectively treating clients. These personality patterns are also vital in identifying Thinking Errors that can be treated with a Cognitive Behavioral approach. However showing gender differences in mean test scores via the personality disorder scales are still hard to figure out compared to its predecessors. (Version 1&2) This is mainly due to the unrevised manuals that accompany it (the manual contains separate information for Male and female) In turn there has also been an indication that there does not appear to be a descriptive data for any clinical sample to compare male and female MCMI-III scores or scale elevations.

However unlike the negativity of the comparison in gender elevations there seems to be an abundance of data to the MCMI-III in forensic evaluations. Here we find that research done on the prevalence of histrionic personality disorder indicates that there is no significant difference between genders. However according to the scales we get to see a higher BR score for females than for males. Furthermore on both the Narcissistic and Compulsive personality Disorder scale the BR scores indicate that:

1. Narcissistic personality Disorder is more common in men than in women

2. Compulsive personality disorders are significantly more frequently male that female.

With the Studies done in custody