Psychometric characteristics of Cloninger's criteria for personality disorder in a population of French prisoners

Cloninger has proposed a new procedure to assess personality disorders on the basis of his model of temperament and character. We explored the psychometric characteristics of this instrument in 560 male prisoners, using factor analyses. Results showed that the 20 items relating to the general personality criteria have acceptable internal consistency and that the three-factor structure of the temperament items used to subtype personality disorder are correctly identified by a maximum likelihood factor analysis model with varimax rotation. Overall, 32% of prisoners had a personality disorder according to this model, and it was possible to subtype 68% of these. This new diagnostic procedure for personality disorder seemed to have satisfactory basic psychometric characteristics but further study is required to explore the concurrent validity and the reliability of this instrument.