The purpose of this rejoinder is to emphasize several important areas of future research that were mentioned by one or both commentaries. First, the authors discuss issues related to multi-source assessment, such as the importance of further research on informant bias, andargue that the information gleaned from multiple sources is worth the added assessment burden. Second, they underscore the importance of longitudinal assessment both in capturing the treatment-relevant within-person processes through which personality pathology unfolds, as well as tracking therapeutic progress. They assert that a given measure’s ability to reliably and validly measure change over time should be considered when evaluating its clinical utility. Finally, they emphasize the need for greater attention to clinical utility of dimensional PD assessment measures.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the current state of the dimensional assessment of personality disorder (PD). The first part of the chapter serves as a review of the most well-established and commonly used measures of maladaptive personality traits. Measures that assess the psychosocial impairment associated with personality pathology also are reviewed. Areas of discontinuity among these measures (e.g., theoretical origin, method of scale construction, degree of correspondence with well-known trait dimensions, attention received in the empirical literature, degree of bipolarity of underlying dimensions) are emphasized, and the clinical utility of measures is evaluated. The second part of the chapter focuses on several controversial issues with which the field of dimensional PD assessment now is grappling. These issues include (a) the psychometric distinction of personality traits from personality functioning, (b) the incremental utility of adaptive trait assessment, (c) the question of maladaptive trait bipolarity, (d) facet-level differences versus domain-level similarity across competing PD trait models, and (e) the value of multi-source assessment.

This comment concurs with Miller and Widiger’s review on the five-factor model’s potential to describe personality pathology. Remaining challenges are the definition of the domain that one wants to cover and how to separate personality description from dysfunction.