Temporal reliability of psychological assessments for patients in a special hospital with severe personality disorder: a preliminary note.

Background: The new programme for assessing those with dangerous and severe personality disorder relies heavily on psychological assessments of personality disorder and risk.
Methods: The temporal reliability of assessments of psychopathy (PCL-R), risk (HCR-20) and personality was assessed using the International Personality Disorder Examination (IPDE) in 15 randomly selected male prisoners in a high secure hospital carried out at intervals varying between a mean of nine and 19 months after initial assessments by a variety of assessors.
Results: Using the intra-class correlation coefficient the agreement varied between 0.57 (HCR-20), 0.58 (PCL-R) and 0.38-0.70 for IPDE personality disorders, with the best agreement for antisocial personality disorder (0.70).
Comment: These levels of agreement are consistent with other recent work on temporal reliability of personality instruments but are a little too low for confidence in these measures alone in the assessment process.