Detecting faking good in military enlistment procedure according to a new index for the MMPI-2
Andrea Bosco, Massaro Ylenia, Andrea Lisi, Angiola Di Conza, Campobasso Filippo, Alessandro O. Caffò, Roberto Catanesi, Vito Martino, Mazzotta Ninì, Ignazio Grattagliano · CINECA IRIS Institutional Research Information System (University of Bari Aldo Moro) · 2020
In forensic contexts, reverse malingering and faking good are no rare observations. Continuing a previous study in which the authors had drawn up an index to detect faking good in forensic contexts (FEDI), based on the MMPI-2 scales, the pre- sent work proposes an index to be used in military enlistment procedures, which has been denominated as the Military En- listment Dissimulation Index (MEDI).The work describes two consecutive studies: in the first study a group of candidates for military enlistment was selected in order to discriminate the MMPI-2 variables at the highest risk of faking and thereby build the MEDI index. In the second study the MEDI index was validated on two different cohorts of candidates for enli- stment, applying the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve for comparisons with a control group.The perfor- mance of MEDI in discriminating enlistment candidates from the volunteer respondents resulted satisfactory in terms of diagnostic accuracy (Cohort 1: Area Under Curve = .79, Standard Error = .03, Sensibility = .85, Specificity = .78; Cohort 2: Area Under Curve = .79, Standard Error = .03, Sensibility = .82, Specificity = .70).