population, and a number of the items were deemed outdated or offensive because of sexual or religious content. The original locally developed norms were considered not representative of the U.S. Furthermore, the test was being translated into foreign languages - by 1976 over 50 translations were available.ĭespite the widespread use of the test, by the 1970s, there were calls for its revision.
In addition to extensive use in clinics and hospitals, the test was being administered to patients in general medical settings, to inmates in correctional facilities, to military personnel, and to candidates for positions involving high stress and responsibility for public safety.
A manual for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a broad-band clinical test of personality, was published in 1942 by the University of Minnesota Press (Hathaway & McKinley, 1942).Īcceptance of the test grew steadily (Dahlstrom, 1992) until by the late 1950s, the MMPI had become the most widely used objective measure of personality and psychopathology, and the subject of both basic and applied research. The new test was to be a departure from existing self-report personality inventories, which were viewed as too transparent and, therefore, vulnerable to manipulation by test takers, and too narrow to serve as omnibus measures of psychopathology.Īdopting an empirical approach to scale construction, Hathaway and McKinley (1940) described their intention “to create a large reservoir of items from which various scales might be constructed in the hope of evolving a greater variety of valid personality descriptions than are available at the present time” (p. Charnley McKinley, a neuropsychiatrist, began to develop an instrument for use in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Hospital that they described “as an objective aid in the routine psychiatric case work-up of adult patients and as a method of determining the severity of the conditions” (Dahlstrom, 1972, p. Hathaway, a clinical psychologist, and J.