Adapting assessment processes to consider cultural mistrust in forensic practices: An example with the MMPI instruments.

Objective: Our first goal in this study was to identify cultural mistrust critical items (CMCIs) on two versions of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)-the MMPI-Second Edition-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) and MMPI-Third Edition (MMPI-3)-that might be endorsed by people of color because of cultural mistrust rather than clinical paranoia. Our second goal was to determine whether CMCIs and items on the MMPI-2-RF/MMPI-3 Ideas of Persecution scale (Restructured Clinical Scale 6 [RC6]) were endorsed at different rates across cultural groups in a nonclinical college sample and a forensic inpatient sample.

Hypotheses: Our primary hypothesis was that expert raters would reliably identify a subset of MMPI-2-RF and MMPI-3 items as reflective of cultural mistrust.