Chunk #79 — Psychopathology Description and Diagnosis — On the Comprehensiveness, Utility, and Parsimony of Using Homogeneous Constructs to Describe Psychopathology — The parsimony of disaggregation in psychopathology description
To summarize this second section of the article, we maintain that when construct validation and theory testing are based on homogeneous constructs, the clarity of hypothesized and observed relationships among construct measures is advanced. We therefore recommend that psychopathology researchers study dysfunction with unidimensional or homogeneous constructs. This approach also provides increased comprehensiveness of client descriptions, increased utility, and perhaps increased parsimony of psychopathology description. In fact, the study of psychopathology along homogeneous dimensions of functioning is already quite advanced. In the field of personality disorders, descriptive models based on normal personality functioning exist and have been described by clinicians as more useful than the DSM system. Researchers have begun to show that a similar approach can be applied to Axis I disorders as well. Of course, nothing about this approach obviates the value of hierarchical descriptive models, and nothing about this approach precludes the presence of true syndromes of psychopathology.
