Although lack of self-insight and defensiveness are characteristic of many personality disorders (PDs), self report methods such as questionnaires and semi-structured interviews are still regularly, and often exclusively, used to assess personality. In fact, semi-structured interviews are often hailed as the """"""""gold standard"""""""" in PD assessment. The proposed study will investigate whether alternative forms of data such as peer- and stranger-report can augment interview data. Specifically, videotaped semi-structured interviews of people for whom peer-report PD data have been previously obtained will be shown to two naive undergraduate raters and two Master's-level psychologists, who will rate the targets on a battery of PD-related measures. Relationships among undergraduates' and psychologists' ratings, peer-report, and semi-structured interview scores will be examined. It is hypothesized that peer-report will correlate more highly with ratings (both undergraduates' and psychologists') than with the semi-structured interview. The proposed study will address the lack of validity in semi-structured PD interviews and will address how best to assess PDs.
