There is a large body of studies that apply these methods to empirical data to decide whether a disorder is dimensional or categorical and, in the case of the latter, often seek to describe the distinct categories (see, for example, Haslam et al. 2011 for a review of applications of taxometric methods; Trull & Durrett, 2005 for a review of various methods applied to personality disorders). The aim of the current paper was not to review these different applications to empirical data, nor to provide a thorough review of each of the three approaches separately, but to describe the complexities of the task at hand and to clarify the communalities of, and differences between, the three approaches.
