Oxford Handbook of Personality Assessment

Oxford Library of Psychology

by James N. Butcher (Editor)

Oxford Handbooks offer authoritative and up-to-date reviews of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned chapters from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates, as well as a foundation for future research. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.


As one of psychology's oldest fields, personality assessment is one of the most extensively studied subsets of contemporary psychology. The Oxford Handbook of Personality Assessment synthesizes new and existing literature with clinical practice to provide a comprehensive volume on contemporary personality assessment, including its historical developments, underlying methods, applications, contemporary issues, and assessment techniques. This handbook, part of the Oxford Library of Psychology, addresses both the historical roots of personality assessment and the evolution of its contemporary methodological tenets, thus providing a foundation for the handbook's other innovative focus: the application of personality assessment in clinical, personnel, and forensic assessments.

With a wealth of respected international contributors and unequalled breadth of content, the Oxford Handbook of Personality Assessment offers an authoritative and field-encompassing resource for researchers and clinicians from across the medical health and psychology disciplines (i.e., clinical psychology, psychiatry, and social work) and would be an ideal text for any graduate course on the topic of personality assessment.

Genres: Psychology

768 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

James N Butcher is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Butcher received his graduate training at the University of North Carolina and served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota for over 40 years. He has written more than 50 books and 175 articles on the MMPI®, MMPI®-2, and MMPI-A, including Essentials of MMPI-2 and MMPI-A Interpretation (with Dr Carolyn Williams), published in 2000 by the University of Minnesota Press. He was instrumental in identifying the need for a revision of the MMPI, which resulted in the MMPI Restandardization Project conducted during the 1980s and 1990s.

More recently, Dr. Butcher co-authored two books published by the American Psychological Association: Assessing Hispanic Clients Using the MMPI-2 and MMPI-A (with Jose Cabiya, Emilia Lucio and Maria Garrido, 2007) and the third edition of The MMPI/MMPI-2/MMPI-A in Court (with Ken Pope and Joyce Seelen, 2006). Butcher and 25 colleagues from around the world used the Adolescent Interpretive System of the Minnesota Report to develop International Case Studies on the MMPI-A: An Objective Approach. This casebook illustrates the use of the Minnesota Report with adolescents in 15 countries outside the United States.