INSTITUTE OF SOUTHERN PUNJAB, MULTAN 1

TITLE PAGE

Assignment No# 8

Subject Techniques of Educational Assessment

Class M. Phil Education

Semester First

Name Hina Hameed

Registration No# MPED-021R20P-21

Student ID# 25498

Class ID# 16093

Submitted to Dr. Sadia Imtiaz

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THE PROJECTIVE METHOD OF PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT

Projective techniques are characterized by a worldwide approach to the assessment of

personality. Projective techniques are usually regarded by their exponents as especially effective
in revealing covert, latent or unconscious aspect of personality. It is understood that the
projective materials will serve as a screen on which the subject will project his characteristics
thought processes, needs, anxieties and conflicts. The respondent's personality will be projected
as a whole unit. It is agreed that projective techniques are more useful to assess some inner
aspects of personality.

Lindsey (1961) suggested a set of criteria that outline the general nature of projective tests as
follows:

 They are capable of measuring many different aspects of personality.

 They leave the client unaware or at least unsure of the specific meaning of his or her responses

. They generate a large amount of complex assessment data.

 They employ relatively ambiguous stimuli.

 They can be interpreted to provide an integrated picture of the client's personality as a whole.

 They are capable of evoking fantasy material from the client.

 They have no right or wrong answers.

Varieties of projective test

Lindsey has categorized the great variety of projective devices into five groups, based on types
of responses required from the subject.

1. Association techniques

Ask the person to respond to some stimulus with first word, image or percept that comes to
mind. Examples are the Rorschach and word association.

2. Construction techniques
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Give the subject the task of producing something, usually a story or a drawing such as the
Thematic Apperception Test. It is more or less a completion test. They can give you a picture
and you are asked to write a story about it. The initial structure is limited and not detailed like the
completion test. For example; two cartoons are given and a dialogue is to be written.

3. Completion techniques

Require the subject to finish an incomplete task in any manner be wishes such as sentence
completion procedure.

4. Choice or ordering techniques

Merely involves a selection among alternatives, sometimes with instructions to rank the
possibilities in order of preference or attractiveness, such as the Tamika’s Horn Picture.
Arrangement Test which consists of sets of three line drawings depicting activities to be arranged
by the subject to make a story.

5. Expressive techniques

Expressive technique Oriented toward revealing personal manner and style in the process of
performing some activities, such as play situations with children or the draw-a-person test.

Popular Example of Projective Tests:

1. The Rorschach inkblot test

2. Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

3. Draw a person test (DAP)

THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective psychological test. Proponents of the

technique assert that subject' responses, in the narratives they make up about ambiguous pictures
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of people, reveal their underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world.
Historically, the test has been among the most widely researched, taught, and used of such
techniques. The TAT was developed during the 1930s by the American psychologist Henry A.
Murray and lay psychoanalyst Christiana D. Morgan at the Harvard Clinic at Harvard University.
Anecdotally, the idea for the TAT emerged from a question asked by one of Murray's
undergraduate students, Cecilia Roberts. She reported that when her son was ill, he spent the day
making up stories about images in magazines and she asked Murray if pictures could be
employed in a clinical setting to explore the underlying dynamics of personality. Murray wanted
to use a measure that would reveal information about the whole person but found the
contemporary tests of his time lacking in this regard. Therefore, he created the TAT. The
rationale behind the technique is that people tend to interpret ambiguous situations in accordance
with their own past experiences and current motivations, which may be conscious or
unconscious. After World War II, the TAT was adopted more broadly by psychoanalysts and
clinicians to evaluate emotionally disturbed patients. Later, in the 1970s, the Human Potential
Movement encouraged psychologists to use the TAT to help their clients understand themselves
better and stimulate personal growth.

PROCEDURE

The TAT is popularly known as the picture interpretation technique because it uses a series of
provocative yet ambiguous pictures about which the subject is asked to tell a story. The TAT
manual provides the administration instructions used by Murray, although these procedures are
commonly altered. The subject is asked to tell as dramatic a story as they can for each picture
presented, including the following:

 what has led up to the event shown

 what is happening at the moment
 what the characters are feeling and thinking
 what the outcome of the story was

The complete version of the test contains 32 picture cards. Some of the cards show male figures,
some female, some both male and female figures, some of ambiguous gender, some adults, some
children, and some show no human figures at all. One card is completely blank and is used to
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elicit both a scene and a story about the given scene from the storyteller. Although the cards were
originally designed to be matched to the subject in terms of age and gender, any card may be
used with any subject. Murray hypothesized that stories would yield better information about a
client if the majority of cards administered featured a character similar in age and gender to the
client. Although Murray recommended using 20 cards, most practitioners choose a set of
between 8 and 12 selected cards, either using cards that they feel are generally useful, or that
they believe will encourage the subject's expression of emotional conflicts relevant to their
specific history and situation. However, the examiner should aim to select a variety of cards in
order to get a more global perspective of the storyteller and to avoid confirmation bias (i.e.,
finding only what you are looking for).

APPLICATIONS

Sometimes it is used in a psychiatric or psychological context to assess personality disorders,

thought disorders, in forensic examinations to evaluate crime suspects, or to screen candidates
for high-stress occupations. It is also commonly used in routine psychological evaluations,
typically without a formal scoring system, as a way to explore emotional conflicts and object
relations.