Original title: Normative Data for PID-5 Items, Facets, and Domains in a Large American Sample
Ian Shryock, Sara J. Weston, Maureen Zalewski, David M Condon · September 2026
Doctors diagnosis personality disorders using a newer framework that checks two things: everyday social functioning and harmful personality traits. The Personality Inventory for DSM-5, called the PID-5, measures these harmful traits through specific questions. But clinicians face a major problem: they do not know what score counts as truly abnormal. To solve this, researchers gathered test scores from over 190,000 Americans. They calculated baseline patterns, called descriptive norms, across individual items, specific personality facets, broad trait domains, and disorder composites. They also measured how specific questions perform and how scores vary across age and gender. These typical ranges give doctors and scientists a clear reference point to spot unusual trait scores and evaluate personality disorders in clinical practice.
You go to the doctor for a checkup. The doctor measures your height and compares it to a chart of average heights for people your age and gender. Without that chart, the doctor would not know if you are unusually tall or short. In this paper, a personality questionnaire is like the height measurement, and the large sample of Americans provides the average scores needed to know if someone's personality traits are unusually extreme.
Clinicians diagnosing personality disorders now have a large reference sample to compare individual patients against. This makes the diagnosis more objective and consistent, moving beyond subjective judgment. Researchers can also use these norms to study how maladaptive traits vary across age and gender.
The sample is limited to Americans, so norms may not apply to other populations. The study provides descriptive norms but does not define clinical cutoffs for maladaptive traits. Item response parameters are provided but their use requires further validation.
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Normative Data for PID-5 Items, Facets, and Domains in a Large American Sample — Ian Shryock, Sara J. Weston, Maureen Zalewski et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/sj48z_v3
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.