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Narcissist or Narcissistic? Evaluation of the Latent Structure of Narcissistic Personality Disorder
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Description: We investigated the latent structure of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) by comparing dimensional, hybrid, and categorical latent variable models, using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), non-parametric (NP-FA) and semi-parametric factor analysis (SP-FA), and latent class analysis, respectively. We first explored these models in a clinical sample, and then pre-registered replication analyses in four additional datasets (with national, undergraduate, community, and mixed community/clinical samples) to test whether the best fitting model would generalize across different datasets with different sample compositions. A one-factor CFA outperformed categorical models in fit and reliability, suggesting the criteria do not serve to distinguish a “narcissist” class or subtypes; rather, a “narcissistic” dimension underlies the NPD construct. The CFA also outperformed hybrid models, indicating that people fall within the same continuous distribution, rather than composing homogenous groups of relative severity (NP-FA) or pulling apart into mixtures of discrete distributions (SP-FA) along that spectrum.