Self-Reports of Male Alcoholics; A Dimensional Analysis of Certain Differences from Nonalcoholic Male Psychiatric Outpatients

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Abstract
The present study reports the results of a dimensional analysis of the responses of 200 diagnosed male alcoholics to 49 items of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory which in a previous study had been found significantly to differentiate diagnosed male alcoholic out-patients from non-alcoholic male psychiatric outpatients. The purpose of this analysis was to determine whether alcoholics'' responses to these items are unidimensional or multidimensional; and, if the latter, to determine whether the obtained item subclusters, construed as dimensions of differential self-representation, provide useful insights concerning the differences between these 2 classes of psychiatric patients. A principle components analysis of the 49 X 49 item inter-correlation matrix yielded 13 factors which were rotated to oblique simple structure. The factors thus obtained were marked by an extreme diversity of manifest content; they ranged from childhood to the contemporaneous, from areas of relative adequacy to areas of relative inadequacy, and from the sacred to the mundane. Since only 1 of these 13 factors - a factor which clearly represents the "blackouts" - is a self-evidently specific consequence of the excessive ingestion of alcohol, it was concluded that the self-representations of diagnosed male alcoholics differ from those of nonalcoholic male psychiatric outpatients in sundry ways which do not appear to be necessarily contingent upon excessive alcohol intake. It is concluded that at least in these respects alcoholics'' self-representations are not such as would be expected if they were simply "neurotics-who-also-happen-to-drink-too-much. ".

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