The latent structure of mental disorders: A taxometric update on the categorical vs dimensional debate

Abstract

Taxometric analysis is a statistical methodology for testing between categorical and dimensional models of latent variables. This article reviews taxometric research on the structure of mental disorders conducted since previous reviews in 2003, a period in which the quantity of this work has more than doubled. Taxometric studies have addressed a wide variety of mental disorders whose status as discrete categories or dimensional continua has been controversial, including unipolar depression, schizophrenia subtypes, post-traumatic stress disorder, and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. They continue to yield categorical and dimensional findings with approximately equal frequency, and wi..