Examination of the Triarchic Assessment Procedure for Inconsistent Responding in Six Non-English Language Samples

• Published in: Psychological assessment 2018-05, Vol.30 (5), p.610-620
• Main Authors: Kelley, Shannon E, van Dongen, Josanne D. M, Donnellan, M. Brent, Edens, John F, Eisenbarth, Hedwig, Fossati, Andrea, Howner, Katarina, Somma, Antonella, Sörman, Karolina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antisocial personality disorder; Attention; Comprehension; Female; Foreign Language Translation; Human; Languages; Male; Measurement; Medicin och hälsovetenskap; Quantitative psychology; Test Construction; Test Validity; Translations
• ISSN: 1040-3590; 1939-134X; 1939-134X
• DOI: 10.1037/pas0000485

The Triarchic Assessment Procedure for Inconsistent Responding (TAPIR; Mowle et al., 2016) was recently developed to identify inattentiveness or comprehension difficulties that may compromise the validity of responses on the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM; Patrick, 2010). The TAPIR initially was constructed and cross-validated using exclusively English-speaking participants from the United States; however, research using the TriPM has been increasingly conducted internationally, with numerous foreign language translations of the measure emerging. The present study examined the cross-language utility of the TAPIR in German, Dutch, Swedish, and Italian translations of the TriPM using 6 archival samples of community members, university students, forensic psychiatric inpatients, forensic detainees, and adolescents residing outside the United States (combined N = 5,404). Findings suggest that the TAPIR effectively detects careless responding across these 4 translated versions of the TriPM without the need for language-specific modifications. The TAPIR total score meaningfully discriminated genuine participant responses from both fully and partially randomly generated data in every sample, and demonstrated further utility in detecting fixed "all true" or "all false" response patterns. In addition, TAPIR scores were reliably associated with inconsistent responding scores from another psychopathy inventory. Specificity for a range of tentative cut scores for assessing profile validity was modestly reduced among our samples relative to rates previously obtained with the English version of the TriPM; however, overall the TAPIR appears to demonstrate satisfactory cross-language generalizability. Public Significance Statement The foreign translation of psychological assessment instruments requires examination of their psychometric equivalence in linguistically and culturally diverse groups. The present study provides support for the cross-language applicability of a recently developed inconsistent responding scale for a commonly administered self-report measure of psychopathic traits among German, Dutch, Italian, and Swedish participants.