Abstract

CUEVAS, Lara; GARCIA, Luis F.; ALUJA, Antón  and  GARCIA, Óscar. Exploratory and confirmatory factorial structure of the MCMI-III Personality Disorders: Overlapping versus non-overlapping scales. Eur. J. Psychiat. [online]. 2008, vol.22, n.2, pp.59-68. ISSN 0213-6163.

Background and Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore the factorial structure of the 14 Personality Disorder (PD's) scales of the MCMI-III for the overlapping and non-overlapping scales, independently. Previous exploratory studies using different factor extraction procedures inform that the structure of MCMI-III personality disorders has between 2 and 4 factors. Methods: The present study used a large sample of 674 non-clinical subjects divided at random in two groups: a) calibration, and b) validation. In the calibration group, principal component analysis with orthogonal rotation was carried out, obtaining 2, 3 and 4 factors for the overlapping and non-overlapping scales independently. In the validation group, the three models were compared using confirmatory factorial analysis techniques. Results and Conclusions: The exploratory and confirmatory results indicate that the 4-factor solution is the most plausible. Although the congruence coefficients between non-overlapping and overlapping scales in the 4-factor solution were higher, confirmatory factor analysis showed that models designed from overlapping scales did not fit well to data.

Keywords : MCMI-III; Exploratory and confirmatory factorial analysis; Personality disorders.

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