The Use of the Maudsley Personality Inventory on University Students

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Abstract
The main aim of this study was to determine how useful the M.P.I. was for forecasting (a) the development of psychological symptoms and (b) academic achievement. The M.P.I. was administered twice; first in the first year and the retest approximately two and a half years later, to a sample of the 1960 intake of students at University College London. Within limits our findings confirm that the M.P.I. may be considered a sound research instrument, for the following reasons: (a) scores on neuroticism and extraversion are normally distributed; (b) these scores differentiate between groups; (c) the test-retest correlations stay high even after two and a half years. The distribution of scores was, however, such that forecasts based on individual scores resulted in too great a proportion of misclassification to be of practical help to the worker concerned with the management of individual cases. The scores fluctuate with the clinical state of the subjects, and thus both neuroticism and extraversion scores of symptom-prone students are less reliable than the "normal" ones.