A manual for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a broad-band clinical test of personality, was published in 1942 by the University of Minnesota Press (Hathaway & McKinley, 1942).Īcceptance of the test grew steadily (Dahlstrom, 1992) until by the late 1950s, the MMPI had become the most widely used objective measure of personality and psychopathology, and the subject of both basic and applied research. The new test was to be a departure from existing self-report personality inventories, which were viewed as too transparent and, therefore, vulnerable to manipulation by test takers, and too narrow to serve as omnibus measures of psychopathology.Īdopting an empirical approach to scale construction, Hathaway and McKinley (1940) described their intention “to create a large reservoir of items from which various scales might be constructed in the hope of evolving a greater variety of valid personality descriptions than are available at the present time” (p. Charnley McKinley, a neuropsychiatrist, began to develop an instrument for use in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Hospital that they described “as an objective aid in the routine psychiatric case work-up of adult patients and as a method of determining the severity of the conditions” (Dahlstrom, 1972, p. Hathaway, a clinical psychologist, and J.
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