I don’t know specifically about the PAI but in actual practice, administration and data collection is often spread out more than a week just because of scheduling and I am struggling with thinking of a reason why that would affect the results. Obviously mood can fluctuate and external factors can affect the results, but a good assessment would take that into account. I have always been of the mind that it is best to try to complete an instrument in one sitting, but it is fairly typical to gather background and collateral data from patient before first appointment and then do a diagnostic interview in first session and schedule testing a week or two later.
it's an issue of test retest reliably testing. my memory is a recent article by Kurtz (don't recall if first or not) had 6 month estimates. This guideline isn't clinically based, see above for response by small town psych. interpretation is probably good to contain on a short basis since we poorly predict outcomes relevant to most evals with pai, mmpi, etc (probation violation, diagnosis, etc)
