Personality Assessment Inventory internalizing and externalizing structure in college students: Invariance across sex and ethnicity

Recent research suggests that several forms of adult psychopathology can be understood as reflecting lower-order elements of a higher-order internalizing/externalizing structure. Internalizing and externalizing factors have been identified with several measures of psychopathology constructs, including the widely used Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI). However, research comparing different models of this structure as well as the fit of the structure across sex and ethnicity has been limited and no research on this topic has been conducted with the PAI. In this study, a simplified PAI internalizing and externalizing structure was found to be superior to a more complex model. Furthermore, the structure was found to be invariant across men and women and Hispanic and Anglo undergraduate respondents living in the United States. These results demonstrate the viability of the PAI to study these constructs and the applicability of this structure across various demographic groups.