Acquiescence and the MMPI: An item reversal approach.

An item-reversal technique was employed to assess acquiescence on the MMPI. Reverse items were constructed for 12 MMPI scales and the 2 forms, standard and reverse, were administered in counterbalanced order to 54 psychiatric patients and 35 normal Ss. True-keyed and false-keyed subscales were scored separately to highlight acquiescence effects. The correlations between true and false subscales and their reverse forms tended, with few exceptions, to approximate the test-retest reliabilities of these scales particularly for the normal Ss. The results were interpreted to indicate that factor analytic techniques have exaggerated the role of acquiescence on the MMPI. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)