Investigation of the clinical functioning of the Dimensional Clinical Personality Inventory 2 criticism avoidance dimension.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the clinical functioning of the criticism avoidance dimension from the Dimensional Clinical Personality Inventory 2 (Inventário Dimensional Clínico da Personalidade 2 [IDCP-2]), establishing a clinically relevant cut-off for the typical traits of avoidant personality disorder (AvPD) for screening purposes.

METHODS: We administered the IDCP-2 to a sample of 2,276 subjects aged 18 to 90 years (mean = 26.95, standard deviation = 9.71). Of the total sample, 1,650 were women (67%) and most were college students (72.7%). The sample was divided into psychiatric patients diagnosed with other personality disorders (PDs) (n = 53), patients diagnosed with AvPD without comorbidities (n = 10), patients with AvPD with comorbidities (n=42) and those without a known diagnosis of PD (nonpsychiatric patients; n=2,171).

RESULTS: We checked for psychometric properties, assessed the adequacy of psychometric assumptions, and proceeded to focus analyses. The Wright item-person map showed the predominance of patients with AvPD in high levels of the scale. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) post hoc comparisons pointed to significant and expressive differences for almost all the comparisons; in the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, we observed a sensitivity of 79% and a specificity of 87%.

CONCLUSION: We found a suitable cut-off for the dimension, and results suggest that the dimension may help clinicians discriminate between patients with and without high levels in the symptoms of AvPD.