Reporting of personality disorder symptoms in a forensic inpatient sample: Effects of mode of assessment and response style

Abstract

Self-report measures of personality disorder are known to over-report personality disorder traits consistently relative to measures based on a clinical interview. This study tests the hypothesis that there is a relationship between a participant's tendency to give socially desirable responses and the discrepancy between their results on self-report and interview-based measures. The relative over-reporting of the self-report measure, the PDQ4, was confirmed, but no association was found between the magnitude of the over-reporting and the tendency to give socially desirable responses.

Keywords:

• Personality disorder
• assessment
• social desirability bias

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our research assistants Ligia Costa and Elizabeth Nyakapanka, who administered a number of questionnaires to participants, and to Paul Bassett of the Statistics Consultancy, who advised us on the statistical analysis.