A perspective on the restructured clinical (RC) scale project

The articles in this issue by Nichols (2006/this issue) and Rogers, Sewell, Harrison, and Jordan (2006/this issue) provide evaluations and critiques of the Restructured Clinical (RC) Scales developed by Tellegen et al. (2003) to reduce the high intercorrelations typically found among MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) Basic scales and to correspondingly improve the discriminate validity of these scales. This manuscript provides another perspective that acknowledges that it would be premature to discontinue the use of the standard MMPI-2 basic scales until more research has been accumulated on the RC Scales. However, it is also proposed that the RC Scales are an innovative and important contribution that holds substantial potential for addressing a number of significant limitations in the MMPI-2 and thereby improving the assessment of psychopathology with this instrument.