I would prefer “measures” to “tests” but “tests” is the prevalent term and that probably says a lot both about the history of these measures and about some of their designers’ intentions and the intentions of those who have used them whether in research or in interventions.
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The fundamental idea is that these measures would make it likely that the respondent will reveal things that wouldn’t show using other methods. Theories vary and some are rooted in psychoanalytic ideas about a dynamic unconscious with the idea that projective measures would bypass the analytic censor systems. That seems to reflect a psychoanalytic model that, to my mind, really fails to understand both that the structures of that censorship are about interpersonal relatedness, “object relations” and highly unlikely to be particuarly active in a “testing” relationship. Other theories are more around the less active models of our having only partial consciousness of ourselves, perhaps more relating to what I would call “psychodynamic” rather than “psychoanalytic” models and to a range of humanistic and interpersonal models of tacit rather than virulently censored self-awareness.
Examples of projective tests include the famous Rorschach test in which participants are shown a standard set of “inkblot” images and asked to comment or say what they see in them. Various ways to channel and standardise interpretation of responses have been developed for those stimuli and there are other inkblot systems. Carl Jun famously used word association. There are a variety of measures that involve the respondent drawing including the “draw a person” and “house-tree-person” measures. Other measures involve sentence and story completion/development.
These measures probably peaked in use in the second half of the 20th Century and I haven’t seen them used systematically in therapy research with adults for years. I think they are still more used where young age and communication and cognitive handicaps impair communication but those aren’t my expert area.
My sense is that it has been popular within “mainstream” psychometrics and measurement work to denigrate these methods and that their defenders and protagonists haven’t done a very good job of engaging with the attacks, perhaps understandably. From my very limited knowledge of these areas one fundamental challenge is whether the defenders or the attackers want to position the measures as having generalisability, having some potential for nomothetic scoring as perhaps some of the Rorschach scoring methods seem to promise, or whether they are to be seen as purely idiographic and as creating opportunities for the person offering the measure and the person completing it to start some sort of verbal or even non-verbal communication. I would love to see exploration of the levels of information transfer addressed by the method of derangements or of “mismatched responses” rather than forced into nomothetic psychometric methods.
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Not covered in the OMbook.
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Follow from the glossary entry for derangements if you want to use that method.
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First created 8.i.25, link to Rorschach entry added 14.ii.25.
