Longitudinal Studies
One of the earliest longitudinal studies investigating personality profiles of medicalstudents utilized the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The MMPI is currently the most widely used and researched objective personality inventory (Greene, 1991). Itwas initially developed in the 1940's by Hathaway and McKinley. The final version of theinstrument consisted of 566 items (550 items and 16 repeated items), and included ten clinicalscales and four validity scales. It was normed on clinical populations and was frequently used inpsychiatric settings. Despite its use in psychiatric settings, the MMPI was the instrument ofchoice for Schofield's (1953a) study of medical students. The purpose of Schofield's (1953a)Phase I study was to determine the frequency of "deviant" scores per clinical scale and toexamine specific MMPI profile patterns. In this phase, the MMPI was administered to twogroups of male medical students--pre-med students from the University of Wisconsin (N = 68),and freshmen medical students (entering class of 1946) from the University of Minnesota (N =83). The MMPI scores from these two groups were compared with those of males in the generalpopulation (N = 256), as well as college student males from the University of Wisconsin (N =2805). The results indicated that the general male population and the college student male groupdiffered from each other, and that the two medical student groups were more similar to eachPersonality Characteristics 11other than to either the general male group or the college student male group. Specifically, themean profiles for the two medical groups revealed primary elevations on Scale 5, the Mf scale (inthe feminine direction) and secondary elevations on Scale 3 (the Hy scale). Additionally, therewas a smaller frequency of high points on Scale 2 (the D scale) for the entering medical studentsthan the pre-med students, and the entering medical students showed a greater frequency of highpoints on Scale 9 (the Ma scale). The author suggested that these findings indicated that moralelevel (and energy level) was higher for the admitted medical students than for those who werenot yet admitted. What the author did not explain was why the general student populationshowed less pathology (i.e., less "no high point" codes) than either of the medical student groups.