Behaviordata's reports are backed by more than 40 years of research and refinement. The system of analysis used by Behaviordata Inc. was designed by Joseph C. Finney, M.D., Ph.D., a psychiatrist and clinical psychologist at the University of Kentucky, with the help of research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Vocational Rehabilitation Administration.
The predecessor to Behaviordata, Inc., Behaviordyne, Inc. was founded in 1971 and was a leader and innovator in the field. Behaviordyne was the first computerized MMPI™ scoring service to produce a narrative report. Behaviordata purchased this company in 1996, and incorporated under the new name. Behaviordata's most utilized service is that of psychodiagnostic narrative reports taken from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2® or the California Psychological Inventory™. Behaviordata reports greatly enhance the usefulness of these tests by applying modern computer technology to their scoring and interpretation. Behaviordata reports for the MMPI-2® and CPI™ are enriched by hundreds of added scales, factors, and indices.
The Behaviordata Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2®) and California Psychological Inventory (CPI™) system of test analysis is unique in that it is the only system that was based upon a real-world population at the time of its development. The sophisticated computer algorithms used to analyze the MMPI-2® and CPI™ were developed initially by the prestigious University of Kentucky Research Foundation in a major research project. More than 2,000 subjects were tested using both inventories and were rated by experienced clinical psychologists. Instead of utilizing family members of psychiatric patients, visitors to psychiatric hospitals, or college students, Dr. Joseph Finney, the originator of the system, with the aid of a Health, Education and Welfare grant, obtained a real-world sample that truly reflected the U.S. population. Finney's approach was to find a sample of citizens that would match the U.S. Census. He did this by contacting service organizations such as the Rotary, Kiwanis,and Lions Clubs, and Shriners, as well as PTAs, and offered to make a donation to their organizations if they would participate in his research. To represent the population of poverty-level people, he went to Departments of Unemployment and randomly selected persons who matched the US. Census profiles; he offered to pay them if they would participate in his research by taking the MMPI™. His samples of people who had diagnosable conditions came from hospitals and clinics. Each patient was re-evaluated by Dr. Finney's research team to be sure that the person truly met the clinical criteria for these conditions.
Behaviordyne was founded to bring the University of Kentucky Research Foundation assessment system to the commercial marketplace. In the ensuing years, Behaviordata has collaborated with the original authors to continue the research, development, and refinement of the UKRF system for the MMPI-2® and CPI™. Enhancement continues today with the guidance of David S. Nichols, Ph.D., President of the Behaviordata Scientific Board, to ensure that Behaviordata's reports define state-of-the-art psychoanalytic assessment.
Dr. David S. Nichols earned his M.S. in General Psychology in 1970 and Ph.D. in 1973. Most of his clinical work has been with acute and chronic psychiatric patients at Dammasch State Hospital in Wilsonville, Oregon, and at Oregon State Hospital, Portland, from which he retired in 1999. His theoretical orientation is eclectic, in which interpersonal and learning principles figure prominently.
Nichols' research and assessment interests focused early on structured personality inventories, particularly the MMPI™/MMPI-2®, and the majority of his extensive library of publications are related to this instrument. He has taught courses, seminars, and workshops, and has presented papers in objective personality assessment and MMPI™/MMPI-2® interpretation in the United States and Europe since 1973. His major publications include the MMPI-2® Structural Summary (with Roger L. Greene), published by Psychological Assessment Resources, Psychological Assessment with the MMPI-2® (with Alan F. Friedman, Richard Lewak, and James T. Webb), published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and, most recently, Essentials of MMPI-2® Assessment, published by John Wiley & Sons.
Dr. Everstine received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in 1974. Following graduation, Dr. Everstine went on to become an expert in trauma, emergency response, pre-employment screening, and threat assessment. She has co-authored five professional textbooks on trauma. She has taught Psychological Aspects of Pre-employment Screening at San Jose State University, and at The Criminal Justice Training Center.
Dr. Everstine has extensive experience in assessing trauma in law enforcement agencies, psychological profiling, threat assessment, and conducting clinical evaluations. She has worked for numerous corporations as a consultant for executive search and pre-employment screening. In 1996, she became President of Behaviordata, Inc., which has provided behavioral assessment and screening since 1974. To date, none of Behaviordata's clients has been compromised, and the Behaviordata process has never been successfully challenged.
Dr. Everstine is a graduate of the New School for Social Research, New York City. He holds Master's degrees in Science and Public Health, and his doctorate is in Psychology. He was a graduate student of Philosophy at Oxford University (Linacre College), where he worked and taught in the Department of Social and Administrative Studies. Upon his return to the United States, he worked as a researcher in the Human Factors in Technology Research Group and The Center for Research in Management Science at U.C. Berkeley. He is the co-author of five psychology textbooks. He is a Fellow of the Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto, and a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, London.
Joseph C. Finney, the author of the MMPI-2® and CPI™ interpretation programs, was born in 1927 in Urbana, Illinois. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree (Phi Beta Kappa), in Chemistry at Vanderbilt University in 1946, and his Master's degree at Harvard in 1949. After a medical internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he did graduate study in Experimental Biology at U. C. Berkeley, and completed residency training in Psychiatry at the Palo Alto VA Hospital (Stanford) betweem 1953 and 1956. At the same time, he was enrolled in graduate study at Stanford for his Ph.D. in Psychology, awarded in 1959. He learned about the MMPI™ and CPI™ at U.C. Berkeley under Harrison Gough, taking him as a lifelong mentor.
Dr. Finney began collecting data and developing scales, with an eye to devising the first automated interpretation program for the MMPI™ and CPI™ , in the mid-and-late 1950s. This preliminary work continued until 1966 when, while at the University of Kentucky, he received research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Vocational Rehabilitation Service to support the collection of new normative data, and to operationalize the first version of his computerized MMPI™ /CPI™ interpretation system.
Dr. Finney and the University of Kentucky later licensed his program to Behaviordyne in Palo Alto and, more recently, to Behaviordata in Cupertino, in order to make the program more available to others, particularly private practitioners in Psychology and Psychiatry. During the 1970s, Dr. Finney developed major additions to the computer interpretation service, including procedures for identifying patterns of alcoholism and drug abuse, for violence, for estimating suitability for different kinds of work, and for qualities affecting marriage counseling. In the 1980s and '90s, Dr. Finney continued to revise and update his program, but, in order to accommodate other interests, he has recruited David S. Nichols, Ph.D. as his designated successor for updating and improving the program.
Dr. Murray Tondow has been actively involved in psychology for more than 50 years having received his doctorate from the University of Southern California in 1953. During this period, his activities have been in academia, research, and clinical work. His long-term interests, dating back to the early 50's, have been the utilization of computers in behavioral sciences. He has presented and published more than 100 papers. His paper, "An Alternative Methodology for Predicting Behavior", was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science - Pacific Division, 84th Annual Meeting - June 2003. In 1971, Dr. Tondow founded Behaviordyne and served as President until 1986, at which time he retired from full time work. He is currently working as a consultant and conducting research in the area of building computer-generated models to analyze and predict human behavior.