Evaluating cross-cultural equivalence of ArabicMMPI-2 Via bilingual test-retest method and Algerian sample

الملخص EN

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI/MMPI-2) (Butcher & Rouse, 1996) is the most extensively researched and most widely used personality assessment questionnaire in the United States and is widely adapted in other countries.

Both the original MMPI (Butcher & Pancheri, 1976) and the revised form (MMPI-2) have been extensively adapted for international use (Butcher, 1996; Butcher et al., 2003).

In Arab countries, Soliman (1996)* translated the MMPI-2 into Arabic and the University of Minnesota Press carried out the back translation and the evaluation of this translation using a professional linguist; then, after a few editorial and stylistic changes, the Arabic translation of the MMPI-2 was approved for use by the University of Minnesota.

Soliman examined the validity of the Arabic MMPI-2 via a clinical study but he did not evaluate the cross-cultural equivalence of the test in Arabic countries.

In this contribution, we extend his research by incorporating a bilingual test –retest method.

The aim of this study was to examine the adequacy of the Arabic translation of the MMPI-2 via assessing a sample of Algerian people.

A reliability study of the translated version was conducted to assess the comparability of the Arabic MMPI-2 to the English form.

Correlations coefficient of the clinical and content scales were calculated for the two versions.

The crosslanguage correlations have reported moderate to high correlations between languages versions of the test.

Correlations coefficient are comparable to test-retest correlation of English-English scales scores.

For the validity and clinical scales, the correlation of the Arabic-English scores for the total sample were generally high (ranging from a low of .50 for the Sc scale and a high of .91 for the Mf scale) with a mean of .72.

For the content scales, the correlations of the Arabic-English scores were slightly higher (ranging from .71 to .94).

The mean raw scores for the scales of both versions, and the mean profile configuration of validity, clinical and content scales for the Algerian sample, show that the English and Arabic versions are comparable.