| The purpose of the present study was to adapt the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) into Amharic, and to evaluate its psychometric equivalence to the original MMPI-2. The Amharic MMPI-2 has potential as a clinical assessment instrument for use in Ethiopia where structured clinical assessment and empirical research are underdeveloped and also in countries where the Ethiopian immigrant and refugee populations exist.;The original MMPI-2 was translated into Amharic using the committee approach of initial translation and repeated back-translation procedures. A bilingual test-retest study was conducted with 30 Ethiopian volunteers who took the MMPI-2 in both Amharic and English approximately one week apart. The resulting test-retest reliability correlations were much higher for men than for women.;The Amharic version of MMPI-2 was also administered to a group of 274 Amharic-speaking Ethiopian college students ages 18 to 65 from the University of Addis Ababa and Micro Link College located in the city of Addis Ababa. Data from these students were analyzed at the following levels. First, the internal structure of the Amharic MMPI-2 was examined through the use of factor analysis and was compared to the factor structures of the English and Korean versions MMPI-2. A similar four-factor solution emerged from the Amharic MMPI-2 for the clinical scales. For the content scales, two-factor and four-factor solutions were found with the two-factor solution being the most interpretable and comparable to other cultures.;The comparison of MMPI-2 scale means and standard deviations across cultures showed that Ethiopian college students had elevated scores for most of the basic, content and supplementary scales of the MMPI-2. Finally, examinations at the item level, including comparisons of item endorsement frequencies, percentages and extreme items across cultures showed that the majority of the items were endorsed in a similar direction in the two cultures and items corresponding to elevated scales among Ethiopian students resulted in higher item endorsement percentage differences.;Future research should focus on testing the validity of the Amharic MMPI-2 by collecting data from psychiatric patients. In addition, the collection of a normative sample of Ethiopia is recommended in order to have culture-specific norms. |
