Professor of Psychology David C Richard co-authored two manuscripts. The first was published in the Western Journal of Nursing Research on factor analysis of a self-care measure commonly used in nursing research. The second paper was accepted to the American Pyschological Association (APA) journal Personality Disorders and was another factor analysis, this time involving a large data set of 1600 patients diagnosed with one or more personality disorders.

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Although the Denyes Self-Care measure has been promoted as a unidimensional measure, Diane Andrews and Karen Aroian of the University of Central Florida and Richard found the measure was multidimensional, implying that the current scoring system did not adequately take into account the underlying structure of the instrument.  Because the measure is widely used in nursing research, the findings will have an effect on the way scores on the Denyes are interpreted in the future. 

Richard and colleagues Steve Huprich of Eastern Michigan University, Mark Zimmerman of Brown University, Thomas Schmitt of Eastern Michigan Unviersity, and Iwona Chelminski of Brown University were interested in whether the DSM-IV, a diagnostic manual for mental disorders, structure for personality disorders would be supported when looking at clinician interviews of personality disordered patients.  Past research had focused on self-report measures, but no research to date had looked at clinician ratings.  In short, they found a factor structure for the personality disorders that only bore a vague resemblance to the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria, suggesting that some re-thinking of PD diagnoses may be warranted.