MMPI response patterns of college students: Comparisons to adolescents and adults

The consistent finding that normal adolescents endorse more MMPI items in the deviant direction than do normal adults, reflected in reliable adolescent-adult differences on the item, scale, and profile levels, suggests a developmental perspective. This perspective also implies that college students' MMPI mean raw scores might be expected to fall between means typically obtained for adolescents and adults. We examined 17 studies of college volunteer samples to evaluate this hypothesis. Findings showed that college student mean values do fall between adolescent and adult means, most strikingly on scales F, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9. It is recommended that more attention be given to the status of college students as a special population with distinctive MMPI characteristics.