Response Bias on the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5)

While the validity and clinical utility of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5; Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, and Skodol, 2012) has been established (e.g. Fossati, Krueger, Markon, Borroni, & Maffei, 2013), overlap between the wording of some items and wording of the response scale anchors is a potential limitation that, to our knowledge, has yet to be explored. Questionnaire responses can be affected by many factors, including positive vs negative wording (Kalton and Schuman, 1982), scale prompt order (Krosnick & Alwin, 1987), and exposure to extraneous information (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). The PID-5 contains the following four response scale anchors: 1) very false or often false, 2) sometimes or somewhat false, 3) sometimes or somewhat true, and 4) very true or often true. Of the 220 items that comprise the PID-5, 46 contain the words sometimes, often, or very (e.g. “sometimes you need to exaggerate to get ahead”) which could potentially bias respondents towards the response anchors containing the same words. This study will investigate whether item-wording biases responses on the PID-5. University undergraduate students (estimated N = 100) will complete the PID-5, and response frequencies on the 46 overlapping PID-5 items will be examined using chi-square and compared to response frequencies on the 174 non-overlapping items. Discussion will address the implication of these findings for clinical practice and future research