All the Same? Different Measures of Personality Functioning Are Similar but Distinct. A Comparative Study from a Psychodynamic Perspective Using Exploratory Graph Analysis

Abstract

Personality functioning (PF) is a central construct in many theories of personality pathology. Based on psychodynamic theories, two screening questionnaires to assess PF are widely used: The Inventory of Personality Organization—16 item version and the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis—Structure Questionnaire Short Form. This study aimed to explore the similarities and differences of the two questionnaires in a large clinical sample of N = 1636 psychotherapeutic inpatients. Correlation analyses were conducted to examine the associations between the global scores and between the subscales. The study further used Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) to explore the dimensionality of the items. The stability of estimates was evaluated using a bootstrap version of EGA (bootEGA). The results indicated that the two questionnaires are highly correlated, yet not multicollinear, and moderate to large correlations were found between their subscales. EGA revealed six dimensions that fairly represented the original subscales. BootEGA showed that the dimensions and items were stable, except for one item that did not load sufficiently on any dimension. The findings suggest that although the questionnaires are highly correlated, their subscales tap into distinct domains of PF. We discuss implications stemming from these findings for clinical and scientific practice.

Acknowledgments

We thank Leonard Schramm for help in proofreading.

Author contributions

LV performed data analyses and drafted the first manuscript. SHS, CB, CS, and FJ provided critical revisions. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Data availability statement

The R code has been made publicly available at the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/muh95/. The raw data of this study are available from CS upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

Larissa Vierl received funding from the Akademie für Psychoanalyze und Psychotherapie München e.V. and the Steger Hein Stiftung. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation or writing of this article.