The Millon clinical inventories, research critical of their forensic application, and Daubert criteria.

Forensic and correctional applications of the personality assessment inventory

“…The effects of Daubert have been to increase the scrutiny regarding the degree of scienti®c reliability and validity of assessment methods, as well as increase the focus on research that exists to support their use in a clinical-forensic context. In some cases, this increased level of scrutiny has resulted in considerable professional disagreement regarding whether a speci®c psychometric instrument meets Daubert criteria (see, e.g., Dyer & McCann, 2000;Retzlaff, 2000;Rogers, Salekin, & Sewell, 1999, for an extensive debate over the MCMI).…”

The MCMI-III in Child Custody Evaluations

“…Despite the fact that McCann and Dyer (1996) recommended clinicians use the MCMI-II instead of the MCMI-III in forensic settings because of scant validity data in the original edition of the MCMI-III manual (Millon, 1994), there have been recent advances in the literature which outdate this recommendation and which now support validity of the MCMI-III and its use in forensic evaluations (Craig, R. J., 1999;Craig & Bivens, 1998;Craig, Bivens, & Olson, 1997;Davis & Hays, 1997;Davis, Wenger, & Guzman, 1997;Dyce, O'Connor, Parkins, & Janzen, 1997;Dyer, 1997;Dyer & McCann, 2000). Moreover, the MCMI-III manual has been revised and the most recent edition includes a more expanded and detailed validity study which supports use of the MCMI-III in forensic assessments (Millon, Davis, & Millon, 1997).…”

“…However, Dyer and McCann (2000) cited several methodological shortcomings of the Rogers et al (1999) study, including arbitrary reversal of predictor and criterion, an incomplete review of the literature that failed to consider the most current edition of the MCMI-III manual, inaccurate statements about content validity of the MCMI-III, misleading criticisms about use of the MCMI-III for evaluating legally relevant issues, and serious errors in the multitrait-multimethod procedures employed by Rogers et al (1999) that render their findings meaningless. Therefore, while forensic application of the Millon inventories in forensic settings is a topic of debate, there remains substantial support for continued use of the MCMI-III in many types of forensic evaluations (Dyer, 1997;Dyer & McCann, 2000) This paper reports findings from a normative study of how child custody litigants perform on the MCMI-III. We sought to answer three general questions in this study: (1) How do individuals undergoing a child custody evaluation typically score on the MCMI-III; (2) Does the MCMI-III overpathologize child custody examinees; and (3) Are there any modifications in interpretation of the MCMI-III that may be required in child custody settings?…”

Prevalence rates of comorbid disorders in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder adults

“…One of the reasons for this would be that there are differing opinions about the diagnostic validity of the MCMI as whole, but more so that different subscales have more or less diagnostic validity (Dyer & McCann, 2000;Hsu, 2002;Retzloff, 1996). Another reason would be that a personality disorder should not be diagnosed on results on one particular test.…”