Constructs versus Measures in Personality and Other Domains: What Distinguishes Normal and Clinical?

Abstract

Psychopathology has long been recognized as dysfunction of normal psychological systems (Cloninger, 1987; Eysenck, 1947). Indeed, examination of psychological disorders is one of the avenues through which the structure of normal personality was discovered (Gibby & Zickar, 2008). Melson-Silimon, Harris, Shoenfelt, Miller, and Carter (2019) describe a collision course between the objective of accurate personnel assessment and the need for organizations to provide access for persons with mental health disabilities. Their alarm is misplaced. Frameworks for distinguishing normal and clinical assessments are already well-established, and the need to use different instruments or scoring methods for workplace versus clinical assessment is not unique to the personality domain. In this commentary, we highlight the critical distinction between constructs and their normal versus clinical measurement (cf. Dilchert, Ones, & Krueger, 2014) and demonstrate that normal and clinical personality measures have distinct psychometric properties, even while measuring the same underlying personality constructs. We also show that Melson-Silimon et al.’s concerns about similarity of normal and clinical constructs and their measurement apply to a wide variety of psychological constructs that are routinely assessed in organizational applications. We end by urging caution in interpreting normal and clinical personality measures and offer evidence-based guidance for personality assessment practice.