The Elemental Psychopathy Assessment (EPA): Factor structure and construct validity across three German samples.
Sabrina SchneiderDahlnym YoonAndreas MokrosMaximilian Fritz SchwarzAngelina BasterDenis KoehlerPublished in: Psychological assessment (2022)
Psychopathy is deemed an important construct in forensic settings. Consequently, its theoretical basis and measurement are relevant to researchers but also to criminal justice administrators and decision-makers. The Elemental Psychopathy Assessment (EPA) is a recently developed self-report scale designed to measure psychopathic traits based on the five-factor model, one of the most comprehensive frameworks of general personality. Recent research provided initial support for the reliability and construct validity of the EPA, and exploratory factor analyses yielded a four-factor structure across different samples from the United States. Independent and confirmatory assessments of the construct validity and factor structure of the EPA are, however, pending. Across three independent, non-American samples (accumulated N = 1,803), we examined its content and factorial validity. We corroborated the proposed four-factor structure by means of both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA). Item-based CFA further indicated that the EPA items adequately measure the scales that they were initially assigned to. Taken together, the EPA is a psychometrically sound assessment tool for psychopathy. Given its substantial overlap with basic units of personality, the EPA represents a valid instrument to investigate psychopathy from a dimensional, trait-based perspective. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).