Description
Construct validity of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory in a Dutch-speaking community sample Inge Debast, Mercedes De Weerdt, and Gina Rossi Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium [email protected] The Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI; Pincus et al., 2009) is a questionnaire measuring not only the commonly accepted grandiose, but alsothe vulnerable aspects of narcissistic pathology, consistent with clinical theories of narcissism. This study explored the structural and criterion validity of the PNI in a Dutch-speaking community sample (n=133). To compare this solution with the seven-factor structure on item level as found in Pincus et al. (2009) during the development of the instrument, the same methodological decisions were taken: Exploratory principal component analysis and subsequent oblique rotation were used; in a next step factor loadings were compared applying Procrustean rotation. Parallel analysis was applied to evaluate how many factors should be derived to ideally describe the underlying structure. Next, the criterion validity of the two themes was assessed by evaluating the correlations of narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability with the Narcissistic Personality Inventory total score (NPI; Raskin & Terry, 1988) and the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised scales (PPI-R; Lilienfeld & Andrew, 1996) covering predominantly adaptive grandiose narcissism and some dysfunctional narcissism aspects respectively. Preliminary findings suggest two factors resembling the two acknowledged dimensions of pathological narcissism, along with a third factor reflecting covert grandiose fantasies. Both factors are not significantly correlated with the NPI, supporting the PNI as a measure of maladaptive narcissism that discriminates from adaptive narcissism. The patterns of correlations with the PPI-R are consistent with expected correlations from previous research and supported the discriminant validity of narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability as pathological themes. We conclude that grandiosity and vulnerability are related conceptualizations of pathological narcissism, both reflecting defective self-regulation mechanism, however with different expressions resulting in a different nomological network in terms of external correlates| Period | 27 May 2014 |
|---|---|
| Event title | BAPS 2014 |
| Event type | Other |
| Sponsor | KU Leuven |