A systematic approach to the delineation of personality disorders.

The author describes a structured approach to the definition of personality disorder diagnoses using traits or generalized behavioral dimensions as the basic unit of definition. Features of personality disorder diagnoses, identified from the clinical literature and rated by psychiatrists for the degree to which they were prototypical of each diagnosis, were classified into 79 behavioral dimensions. A sorting task used to establish whether other clinicians agreed on the classification of highly prototypical features into dimensions yielded satisfactory levels of agreement. A mail survey of a random sample of psychiatrists indicated that these dimensions possessed satisfactory content validity.