Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Personality disorders (PDs) can disturb the affected individual, those around them, and even society at large. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5) considers PDs as long lasting maladaptive patterns of behaviour, cognition, and inner experience. Criterion B in its Section III is the descriptive diagnostic core and is composed of dimensional pathological personality traits organized in five main domains. These five domains are composed of 25 lower-order trait-facets. The assessment of these is operationalized using the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5). The PID-5 has proved valid and reliable in a variety of countries but the PID-5 translated into Farsi is limited to only a few studies and lacks validity. Therefore, establishing cross-cultural validity for the Farsi version is crucial. The goal of the current cross-cultural invariance study is to investigate whether the lower order facet-traits can be extracted from the PID-5 Farsi version by administering both the Farsi and English versions to a bilingual Iranian clinical sample. The study will include 200 treatment seeking Iranian adults residing in Canada who are fluent in Farsi and English. Once English and Farsi fluency is confirmed using the Wide Range Achievement Test and bilingual Iranian researchers, participants will proceed to complete the English and Farsi versions of the PID-5 in a counterbalanced order. Exploratory factor analysis will be used to examine the emerging facet-trait structure of the Farsi PID-5. This study will assist clinicians in making diagnosis for Iranian Canadians and also establish validity for the Farsi PID-5. This study will also facilitate the study of cultural differences in personality psychopathology between Western countries and Iran.