Internal Consistency and Convergent Validity of the Personality Assessment Inventory English and European-Spanish Version with English/Spanish Bilinguals

Abstract

Practitioners have few personality inventory options when assessing Spanish-speakers, despite professional guidelines that encourage them to administer measures that are validated with their populations of interest. To build on research in this area, we examined the internal consistency and convergent validity of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) and the Personality Assessment Inventory European-Spanish (PAIE-S) version among bilingual Latin American Spanish-speakers (final n = 53). For the PAI, 72.72% of scales and 35.48% of subscales had alphas above .70. For the PAIE-S, 50.00% of scales and 25.81% of scales met this alpha. Participants tended to score lowest on the PAI Alcohol Problems scale (T = 47.19) and the PAIE-S Warmth scale (T = 45.49). On average, participants scored highest on the PAI’s Paranoia-Hypervigilance scale (T = 61.15) and the PAIE-S’s Paranoia scale (T = 57.64). We identified 10 scales and subscales on which participants were significantly more likely (p < .00094) to score higher on one measure than the other. Participants more often scored higher on the PAI than the PAIE-S. All parallel scales and subscales converged at p < .00094 with the exception of the Antisocial Features-Egocentricity scale. Taken together, findings suggest taking caution when administering these measures to Latin American bilingual Spanish-speakers.