Projective technique
| Projective tests | |
|---|---|
| Medical diagnostics | |
| MeSH | D011386 |
In psychology, a projective test is a personality test designed to let a person respond to ambiguous stimuli, presumably revealing hidden emotions and internal conflicts projected by the person into the test. This is sometimes contrasted with a so-called "objective test" / "self-report test", which adopt a "structured" approach as responses are analyzed according to a presumed universal standard (for example, a multiple choice exam), and are limited to the content of the test. The responses to projective tests are content analyzed for meaning rather than being based on presuppositions about meaning, as is the case with objective tests. Projective tests have their origins in psychoanalysis, which argues that humans have conscious and unconscious attitudes and motivations that are beyond or hidden from conscious awareness.
The general theoretical position behind projective tests is that whenever a specific question is asked, the response will be consciously-formulated and socially determined. These responses do not reflect the respondent's unconscious or implicit attitudes or motivations. The respondent's deep-seated motivations may not be consciously recognized by the respondent or the respondent may not be able to verbally express them in the form and structure demanded by the questioner. Advocates of projective tests stress that the ambiguity of the stimuli presented within the tests allow subjects to express thoughts that originate on a deeper level than tapped by explicit questions, and provide content that may not be captured by responsive tools that lacks appropriate items. After some decrease in interest in the 1980s and 1990s, newer research suggesting that implicit motivation is best captured in this way has increased the research and use of these tools.
This holds that an individual puts structure on an ambiguous situation in a way that is consistent with their own conscious and unconscious needs. It is an indirect method- testee is talking about something that comes spontaneously from the self without conscious awareness or editing.
The best known and most frequently used projective test is the Rorschach inkblot test. This test was originally developed in 1921 to diagnose schizophrenia. Subjects are shown a series of ten irregular but symmetrical inkblots, and asked to explain what they see . The subject's responses are then analyzed in various ways, noting not only what was said, but the time taken to respond, which aspect of the drawing was focused on, and how single responses compared to other responses for the same drawing. It is important that the Rorschach test and other projective tests be conducted by experienced professionals to ensure validity and consistency of results. The Rorschach was commonly scored using the Comprehensive System (CS), until the development of the newer scoring system, the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS) in 2011.The new scoring system has stronger psychometric properties than the CS, and, like the CS, allows for a standardized administration of the test which is something that is lacking in a majority of projective measures. Additional psychometric strengths present with the R-PAS include updated normative data. The norms from the CS were updated to also include protocols from 15 other countries, resulting in updated international norms. The CS international norm data set was based on fewer countries, most of which were European only. The new international norms provide a better representation of the Western hemisphere and westernized countries. Concerning differences in administration of the task across both scoring systems, a critical issue with CS administration was addressed in the development of the R-PAS. Following CS administration procedure, it was common to obtain too few or too many responses per card which could result in an invalidated protocol (due to too few responses) or in error. The new administration procedure introduced in the R-PAS requires the clinician to initially tell the examinee that they should provide two or three responses per card, and allows the clinician to prompt for additional responses if too few are given, or to pull cards away if too many are given. Therefore, the new administration procedure addresses the critical issue of number of responses that was prevalent with use of the CS administration procedure. The CS administration procedure prevented clinicians from prompting for more responses or pulling cards when too many responses were provided. An additional psychometric improvement concerns the presentation of obtained scores. With the R-PAS system, it is now possible to change scores to percentiles and convert percentiles to standard scores which can be presented visually and allow for easy comparison to the normative data. With the CS, this was not possible and it was more difficult to compare results to normative comparison groups. Lastly, the R-PAS scores have been shown to possess similar and sometimes stronger inter-rater reliability than was seen in scores from the CS. This means that when different clinicians score the same protocol, they are quite likely to derive the same interpretations and scores.
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