Adattamento Italiano della Scala di Perfezionismo Multidimensionale (MPS) di Frost

One of the scales most widely used to measure perfectionism is the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS) proposed by Frost and colleagues (Frost, Marten, Lahart and Rosenblate, 1990). The MPS includes 35 items grouped together in 6 subscales: 1) high personal standards; 2) excessive concern about making mistakes; 3) excessive concern about the quality of personal actions; 4) excessively high parental expectations towards the child; 5) excessive parental criticism and blame towards the child for failing to achieve the high standards decided by the parent; 6) appreciation of order, cleanliness, organisation. This study was performed to obtain an Italian version of the MPS and to assess the psychometric features. The principal components analysis highlighted the existence of 4 factors and not 6. Therefore, the factorial structure is similar to the structure identified by Strober (1998), with the scales regarding concern over mistakes and doubts about actions forming an unique factor and the parental expectations and criticism scales forming an unique factor; the correlations between each of the 4 scale scores and the EDI-2 Perfectionism scale were all positive and significant and account for a portion of variance higher than 24%, with the exception of the Organisation scale, for which the variance corresponds to 7%. The reliability of the scales, measured using Cronbach's alpha coefficient,is always higher than 0,75.