Development and validation of a MMPI-2 scale for experiential avoidance
Historically, psychiatric taxonomies (e.g., the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV, DSM-IV) have acknowledged the importance of avoidance of emotions, feelings, or situations in the symptomatic manifestations of a number of different forms of psychopathology and experimental and clinical research has supported the role of said avoidance in pathogenesis. Experiential avoidance (EA) has been defined as an individual's attempt to alter the form, frequency, or intensity of private experiences, such as emotions, thoughts, memories, or the contexts that elicit these private experiences. A number of contemporary behavior therapists have used EA to conceptualize cases and analyze the function of behavior. However, whereas the conceptualization of cases and the assessment of psychiatric categories are aided by scores on psychometric tests, there exists few like instruments for the identification broad construct of EA. The few psychometric tests of avoidance that have been developed possess questionable psychometric properties; moreover, they fail to measure EA as it is currently conceptualized and/or possess questionable psychometric properties. The primary focus of the present study is the development of an MMPI-2 scale designed to assess features of Experiential Avoidance. Experts on EA rational selected MMPI-2 items to yield a preliminary 53-item pool that assessed a variety of behaviors associated with EA including evaluation of emotions, substance use, and thought of suicide. This item pool was refined based on component structure and statistical properties to yield a 28 item final pool of EA items. The remaining items were deleted due to poor component loadings, purify the component structure (including the elimination of primarily neurotic items), and to improve internal consistency. A college student sample was used to develop the psychometric characteristics of this new EA. The initial coefficient alpha of this 28 item scale was .81. Principal Components Analysis was used to examine the factor structure, yielding a predominant 3-component structure consisting of components labeled evaluation of emotions, escape through suicide, and impulse control. Initial validation was carried out to examine construct and convergent validity by correlating EA concurrently administered measures of avoidance. Further, Stepwise Multiple Regression was used to examine the ability of EA to predict psychological distress based on an independent measure of distress. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)
https://www.upress.umn.edu/test-division/bibliography/2000-2009/2007/roberts_development_2007
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Miguel Roberts
(2007)
Development and validation of a MMPI-2 scale for experiential avoidance
PhD thesis.