Measurement Invariance of the Personality Inventory for the DSM-5 across U.S. East Asian, Southeast Asian, and White Participants

The Personality Inventory for the DSM-5 (PID-5) was developed as a measure of the traits included in the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) in Section III of the DSM. The PID-5 is composed of 25 scales measuring each trait in the AMPD across five domains: Negative Affectivity, Detachment, Disinhibition, Antagonism, and Psychoticism. Previous research suggests that there may be important differences in the expression of personality pathology across race and culture, particularly between people with Eastern and Western cultural heritages. The goal of the current research was to examine the measurement invariance of the PID-5 across these groups. In the current study, 865 young men and women who identified as White, East Asian, or Southeast Asian completed the PID-5 and International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). On the domain level, a multigroup exploratory structural equation model found that the PID-5 had configural and metric invariance, but lacked complete scalar invariance. On an item level, all scales had configural invariance, one lacked metric invariance, and 11 of the 25 scales lacked scalar invariance across race. For the invariant scales, East and Southeast Asians tended to have higher mean scores than White participants. The PID-5 scales had similar relations with IPIP scales across groups. These results suggest that the PID-5 scales are measuring similar constructs across groups on global, structural level, but that mean scores may represent different levels of latent personality pathology across groups. The PID-5 may be confidently used in these groups, but mean comparisons should be interpreted with caution.