Effectiveness of projective technique in the measurement of personality.
Projective techniques which
originated in a clinical setting are indirect measures of personality. In their
tech the individual is given unstructured situation to which he responds. By unstructured
situation is meant a situation, whose meaning and interpretation varies from
the individual to individual. The most important assumption of projective
techniques is that while responding to an unstructured situation an individual
projects his own needs feelings, emotion, motives etc(which are mostly latent
and conscious) Without being aware of doing so. As the individual is not aware
of these relevations, he does not resort to any defensive reactions. Such
latent and concealed experiences are generally incapable of expose by questionnaire.
The two distinguishing features
which set projective techniques apart from other personality assessment measures
are. Projective technique always uses an unstructured and indirect situation
for assessing the personality traits. Projective techniques characterized by global
approach in projective techniques attention is focused upon measurement of
personality as a whole. Projective techniques requires no observer hence
subject to a greater extensive, an objective report as he does not fear that e
is being observed.
Important Projective Tests
- Rorschach Test given by Herman Rorschach.
- Thematic Apperception Test(TAT) by Murray.
- Children Apperception Test (CAT) by Bellak.
Advantages of tests:
- Faking and malingering is minimum.
- Good measures of diagnostic purposes.
- Easy to administer and they retain interest in subjects.
- They use global holistic app to measure personality.
- Measures deep and unconscious aspect of personality, besides conscious aspects.
Disadvantages:
- No consistent meaningful and testable theories underlie the projective technique.
- There are no empirical evidences for most of the postulated relationships between projective test indicators and personality traits.
- There is no standardized measure of administrating them.
- They can’t be easily applied on the people with average or superior intelligence.
- The scoring method is given but yet they dependent to a great extent on the subjective understanding of the examiner.
- Ample evidences are available to show that projective techniques have methodological flaws, are full of statistical errors and are ill designed.
- There is no evidence that conflicts motives and fantasies diagnosed by projective technique will yield congruent results when interpreted by different psychologists or the same psychologist at different time.
- Projective Technique have poor ability to predict faliure in different fields of life as they have low reliability and variable validity.
