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Ecological Validity of the Inventory of Problems-29 (IOP-29): an Italian Study of Court-Ordered, Psychological Injury Evaluations Using the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS) as Criterion Variable

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Abstract

The Inventory of Problems-29 (IOP-29; Viglione, Giromini, & Landis, Journal of Personality Assessment, 99(5), 534–544, 2017) is a 29-item, recently published, self-administered test aimed at assessing the credibility of various symptom presentations. Although available research strongly supports the use of this symptom validity test in malingering-related contexts, to date, only few studies have analyzed data from real-life forensic evaluations. To fill this gap and explore ecological and convergent validity, the current study analyzed data from 74 court-ordered evaluations aimed at establishing the possible presence of psychological injury. Such evaluations are high-stakes situations in which exaggeration or malingering occur relatively often. We used a research-supported and popular symptom validity test, i.e., the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS; Smith & Burger, Journal of the American Academy on Psychiatry and Law, 25:180–183, 1997), as our criterion variable. The IOP-29 produced excellent area under the curve (AUC) values of .98 with a recommended SIMS total score cutoff (≥ 17) and .99 when eliminating too-close-to-classify cases (Rogers & Bender, 2018) and very large Cohen’s d effect sizes of 2.98 and 3.59, respectively. Crucially, when implementing established cut scores from previous research, the IOP-29 yielded very high specificity and sensitivity rates, and the predictions from the two tests were strikingly similar. Taken together, these findings support the strong convergent validity of the IOP-29 and its utility in applied clinical and forensic settings.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that when Giromini et al. (2019a) published their paper, no published studies had yet reported on evaluations from real-life forensic context. More recently, however, one of the samples inspected by Giromini et al. (2019c) did include a small group (n = 28) of patients who had been evaluated for possible malingering in work compensation-related, evaluation context.

  2. Because homoscedasticity could not be assumed, Welch-Satterthwaite method was used to adjust degrees of freedom.

  3. Because homoscedasticity could not be assumed, Welch-Satterthwaite method was used to adjust degrees of freedom.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Neuroscience, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Paolo Roma, Franco Burla, Stefano Ferracuti & Cristina Mazza

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Luciano Giromini

  3. California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University, San Diego, USA

    Donald J. Viglione

Authors
  1. Paolo Roma
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  2. Luciano Giromini
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  3. Franco Burla
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  4. Stefano Ferracuti
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  5. Donald J. Viglione
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  6. Cristina Mazza
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Contributions

Conceived the experiment: PR, CM, SF. Data acquisition: PR. Data analysis: LG. Data interpretation: PR, CM, LG, DV, FB, SF. Drafting of the manuscript: PR, CM, LG, DV. All authors revised the manuscript critically and gave final approval of the version to be published.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristina Mazza.

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Ethics Statement

This study was carried out with written informed consent by all subjects, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. It was approved by the local ethics committee (Board of the Department of Human Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, Sapienza University of Rome).

Conflict of Interest

Luciano Giromini and Donald J. Viglione declare that they own a share in the corporate (LLC) that possesses the rights to Inventory of Problems. All other four authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Roma, P., Giromini, L., Burla, F. et al. Ecological Validity of the Inventory of Problems-29 (IOP-29): an Italian Study of Court-Ordered, Psychological Injury Evaluations Using the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS) as Criterion Variable. Psychol. Inj. and Law 13, 57–65 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-019-09368-4

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