The author describes a structured approach to the definition of
personality disorder diagnoses using traits or generalized behavioral
dimensions as the basic unit of definition. Features of personality
disorder diagnoses, identified from the clinical literature and rated by
psychiatrists for the degree to which they were prototypical of each
diagnosis, were classified into 79 behavioral dimensions. A sorting task
used to establish whether other clinicians agreed on the classification of
highly prototypical features into dimensions yielded satisfactory levels of
agreement. A mail survey of a random sample of psychiatrists indicated that
these dimensions possessed satisfactory content validity.Abstract Teaser