UTILITY OF THE PERSONALITY DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONNAIRE - REVISED IN A NONCLINICAL POPULATION

Although the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-Revised (PDQ-R) has proved useful as a global measure of Axis II symptomatology in clinical (i.e., psychiatric inpatient or outpatient) subjects, the utility of the PDQ-R in nonclinical populations remains unexplored. The present study examined the utility of the PDQ-R in a nonclinical college student sample. Results indicated: (1) that a high proportion of subjects in our sample were assigned personality disorder diagnoses via the PDQ-R, even after the well-documented tendency of the PDQ-R to yield false-positive diagnoses was taken into account; (2) that, as expected, nonclinical subjects who score above the clinical threshold on the PDQ-R composite index show elevated scores on the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (SCL-90), a self-report measure of psychopathology; and (3) that nonclinical subjects who score above the clinical threshold on the PDQ-R composite index obtain SCL-90 scores comparable to those obtained in clinical (outpatient) samples. If the clinical cutoff scores typically used for the PDQ-R were modified to reduce the number of subjects that may be mislabeled as having significant Axis II personality disorder symptomatology, the PDQ-R could be useful as a screening instrument in nonclinical as well as clinical subject populations.