Ethnicity and Gender in Scales of Psychosis Proneness and Mood Disorders

Data for Caucasian, African American, Asian American, and Latino college-student samples were compared for several popular self-report scales of psychopathology. Significant group differences were obtained for all scales, with the Caucasian sample consistently having the lowest means. Some gender effects and interactions with ethnic group were also observed. The authors discuss implica-tions of these findings for use of these scales, including implications for use of Caucasian norms with other ethnic samples. Paper-and-pencil questionnaires are widely used by research-ers studying personality or psychopathology in outpatient and nonpatient samples. This method may serve a variety of purposes, including identification of individuals at elevated risk for psychopathology (e.g., Chapman & Chapman, 1985, 1987; Chapman, Chapman, Kwapil, Eckblad, & Zinser, 1994; Edell, 1995), selection of individuals with elevated base rates of per-sonality disorders (e.g., Rosenberger & Miller, 1989), and vali-dation in nonpatient samples of taxonomic distinctions ob