Homosexuality in Psychology

[Iconoclast08]

Sorry to derail, but...

Makers of the MMPI (which is probably the best test ever designed) once included a homosexuality scale-- the intent was to diagnose whether the test taker was gay.

Bpesta22, you are the MAN (or WOMAN) in helping me defend personality tests (or are they astrology charts ), but I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on the bolded statement above (see Parker, Hanson, & Hunsley, 1988; Jackson et al., 1997; I can give full references if you want them, just let me know).

For the WAIS, based on 26 studies with a total of 3,441 participants, the estimated average validity was 0.62. For the MMPI, based on 30 studies with a total of 4,980 participants, it was 0.46. And for the dreaded (dun dun DUNNN) Rorschach, it was 0.41 (granted, based on 5 studies with 283 participants, but still). In short, it has been found here and in other studies as well that the MMPI and Rorschach are actually more similar than most clinicians are willing to admit on psychometric grounds of reliability and convergent validity (not to mention the Rorschach is actually more stable).

These often cited, classic results always struck me as funny given how clinicians dog the Rorschach but put the MMPI on such a high pedestal of "standardized psychological assessment".

Furthermore, Cronbach alphas of MMPI-2 content scales drop rather precipitously when parceling out response style variance (interferes with construct validity).

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Makers of the MMPI (which is probably the best test ever designed) once included a homosexuality scale-- the intent was to diagnose whether the test taker was gay.

They normed it on combat soldiers on the one extreme versus secretaries (IIRC) on the other.

It didn't work.

Why are combat soldiers and secretaries suitable subjects for normalising personality tests?

 

[Jeff Corey]

Makers of the MMPI (which is probably the best test ever designed) once included a homosexuality scale-- the intent was to diagnose whether the test taker was gay.

They normed it on combat soldiers on the one extreme versus secretaries (IIRC) on the other.

It didn't work.

I like mechanics magazines. I do! Honestly, I do. No kidding.

 

[Dancing David]

Why are combat soldiers and secretaries suitable subjects for normalising personality tests?

I think that the idea was combat soldiers would score low and that secretaries would score high. So the idea was not what you woukld expect. Rather than sampling a bunch of homosexuals.

 

[Jeff Corey]

They didn't call it a homosexuality scale when I was giving them to dozens of people in a project in the '60s, it was the M-F scale. The "I like mechanics magazines. T/F" would add to your masculinity score if you gave one answer. I can't tell you what it is, because I had to swear an oath of secrecy.

 

[I Ratant]

...

To protect women.
...

.
So far as I can determine, the only thing women need fear from a gay is his fashion design making her look strange.

 

[Dr. Imago]

Both homosexual people and heterosexual people can often suffer from complex interpersonal and behavioral problems running the gamut from personality disorders to mood disorders to thought disorders. Couple that with the stressors of complex social interaction against expectations for individuals to fit some pre-conceived notion of what constitutes "normal" sold to us by everyone from our parents to Fifth Ave marketers, and it becomes easier to see the "social distress" placed on a homosexual individual to fit into a society. That stress was/is tied to a reality that other individual members of that society may have/will done/do him or her emotional or physical harm if he/she exposed his/her true feelings and orientation as "abnormal".

I believe the early "bias" of probably well-meaning researchers in trying to understand this complex interplay lead them to erroneously label homosexuality as a distinct mental disorder. It is clear that, in and of itself, homosexuality is not. However, this does not mean that many homosexuals, among the reasons listed above, don't concurrently suffer from other mental disorders - just like heterosexual people - that may have lead to mistaken belief by earlier psychologists and psychiatrists of a cause-effect relationship that doesn't directly exist.

~Dr. Imago

 

[Jeff Corey]

In grad school, we were taught that the correlation implied by the DSM was based on bad samples. The shrinks didn't see "well adjusted" homosexuals, because they didn't go to shrinks. Confirmation bias insured that the shinks didn't conclude that heterosexuality was a "disease", even though those patients were equally screwed up. Al Branca was our "abnormal" prof. He was into Szasz well before his time.

 

[bpesta22]

Thanks Icon-- sorry for the delay too, I forgot about this thread.

I think the MMPI is the most research test ever created, which is different from being the best.