Am J Psychiatry 1987; 144:772-777
Copyright © 1987 by American Psychiatric Association
A systematic approach to the delineation of personality disorders
WJ Livesley
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.
