A Comparison of the Pencil-and-Paper and Computer-Administered Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent

Within the context of a counterbalanced design, 102 students from either a high school or a large Southeastern university were administered two versions of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A): a computer-administered version (CA) and a paper-and-pencil version (PAP). Time between testing sessions was approximately one week. Differences in individual scale means between the CA and PAP were calculated using paired "t" tests, with the Bonferroni correction procedure; no mean differences were statistically significant ( p [greater than] 0.05). To determine if the scale distributions were similar Hartley's homogeneity of variance tests were conducted; there were no differences in the shapes of the scale distributions ( p [greater than] 0.05). Pearson product-moment coefficients were calculated to determine if the relative rankings were similar across administration formats; coefficients for every scale were positive and statistically significant ( p [less than] 0.01). (Contains 4 tables.)