PAI®-A

Personality Assessment Inventory Adolescent

Details

Purpose

Assesses adolescent personality

Authors

Leslie C. Morey, PhD

Administration Formats

Print
Digital

Additional Details

Personality Assessment for Adolescents

Designed to complement its parent instrument, the  Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), the PAI-A is an objective personality assessment for use with adolescents.

Expand all Additional Details

Features and benefits

  • Closely parallels the adult version of the instrument and includes the same scales and subscales but contains fewer items. Items are written at a fourth-grade reading level.
  • Clinical constructs were selected on the basis of their importance within the nosology of mental disorder and their significance in contemporary diagnostic practice and assess experiences (e.g., suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety) that are expressed with reasonable consistency across the life span.
  • Scores are presented in the form of linear T scores, which were calculated with reference to a U.S. Census-matched community sample.

Software Portfolio available

Used to score and interpret PAI-A results, the PAI-A SP provides comprehensive and accurate Clinical Interpretive Reports based on on-screen administration of the PAI-A or hand-entry of an adolescent’s item or scale raw scores.

Collapse all Additional Details
Photo of Personality Assessment Inventory ™  Adolescent
Age Range 12 years to 18 years
Admin Time 30-45 minutes to complete
Qualification Level C

Shop by Bundled Kits

PAI Adolescent Introductory Kit

This kit includes a certificate for 5 FREE PAI Adolescent Interpretive Reports on PARiConnect!

6034-KT
$692.00
6034-KT
What's Included

Shop by Items

FAQs

What is the technical information of the PAI®-A?

Test structure

  • Twenty-two non overlapping scales (four validity scales, 11 clinical scales, five treatment consideration scales, and two interpersonal scales) comprise 264 items. Ten of these scales contain conceptually driven subscales designed to facilitate interpretation and coverage of the full breadth of complex clinical constructs.
  • The Profile form contains a clinical skyline indicating the distribution of scores from a large sample of clinical cases, enabling you to compare your client’s scores with those in the clinical sample.
  • The Critical Items form lists 17 items whose responses may alert the clinician to the existence of behavior or psychopathology that requires immediate attention.

Technical information

  • The standardization of the PAI-A utilized information from (a) a Census-matched sample of 707 community-based students ages 12-18 years in junior and senior high school and college and (b) a clinical sample composed of 1,160 adolescents, most of whom were tested in an outpatient mental health setting.
  • Average internal consistency for the substantive scales was .79 and .80 for the community standardization sample and the clinical sample, respectively.
  • An average test-retest stability coefficient of .78 was found for the substantive scales (M = 18 days; SD = 5.77).
  • The PAI-A was validated against several popular measures of personality and psychopathology, including the MMPI-A, the APS, the NEO-FFI, and the BDI.