Sentence completion test

Sentence completion tests are a class of semi-structured projective techniques. Sentence completion tests typically provide respondents with beginnings of sentences, referred to as "stems", and respondents then complete the sentences in ways that are meaningful to them. The responses are believed to provide indications of attitudes, beliefs, motivations, or other mental states. Therefore, sentence completion technique, with such advantage, promotes the respondents to disclose their concealed feelings. Notwithstanding, there is debate over whether or not sentence completion tests elicit responses from conscious thought rather than unconscious states. This debate would affect whether sentence completion tests can be strictly categorized as projective tests.

A sentence completion test form may be relatively short, such as those used to assess responses to advertisements, or much longer, such as those used to assess personality. A long sentence completion test is the Forer Sentence Completion Test, which has 100 stems. The tests are usually administered in booklet form where respondents complete the stems by writing words on paper.

The structures of sentence completion tests vary according to the length and relative generality and wording of the sentence stems. Structured tests have longer stems that lead respondents to more specific types of responses; less structured tests provide shorter stems, which produce a wider variety of responses.

Hermann Ebbinghaus is generally credited with developing the first sentence completion test in 1897. Ebbinghaus's sentence completion test was used as part of an intelligence test. Simultaneously, Carl Jung's word association test may also have been a precursor to modern sentence completion tests. Moreover, in recent decades, sentence completion tests have increased in usage, in part because they are easy to develop and easy to administer. As of the 1980s, sentence completion tests were the eighty-fifth most widely used personality assessment instruments. Another reason for the increased usage of sentence completion tests is because of their superiority to other measures in uncovering conflicted attitudes. Some sentence completion tests were developed as a way to overcome the problems associated with thematic apperception measures of the same constructs.

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