Assessment of Response Bias in Personality Disorder Research

Abstract

Most research on personality disorders (PDs) relies upon self-reported information, commonly collected via standardized self-report inventories or structured interviews. Such data might, for instance, be culled from archival records from applied evaluative contexts or collected as part of dedicated anonymized research studies. Many factors—such as disengagement, distractibility, or motivation to appear in a certain manner—may influence whether self-reported information accurately reflects an examinee's genuine personality characteristics. Despite resultant risks to the validity of collected data, very few measures used in PD research include embedded indicators of response validity. In this article, we review the need for validity measures and strategies that exist to identify invalid self-report data, and we offer several suggestions for PD researchers to consider in order to detect invalid self-reported information and improve the quality of their data