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Psychology
in
the
Schools
Volume
26,
January
1989
THE NEED-THREAT ANALYSIS:
A SCORING SYSTEM FOR THE CHILDREN’S APPERCEPTION TEST
LOUIS A. CHANDLER
University
of
Pittsburgh
MARK
D.
SHERMIS
M.
ELIZABETH LEMPERT
University
of
Texas at Austin
University
of
Pittsburgh
The study of childhood stress provides a useful perspective for assessing children’s
emotional status. Thematic projective techniques, like the Children’s Apperception
Test (CAT), may be useful in exploring children’s perception of stress. For this pur-
pose, a need-threat analysis is recommended
to
identify those underlying needs and
threats that are likely to make
a
particular event
or
situation important, and hence
potentially stressful, to an individual child. This paper introduces a scoring system
for the CAT based
on
the analysis of thematic data in terms
of
five need-threat binaries,
which serve
as
scoring categories. Preliminary data on reliability are presented.
This paper introduces a scoring system for one of the most widely used projective
techniques with children, the Children’s Apperception Test (CAT). Over the years,
thematic techniques, like the CAT, have been found to be rich sources of clinical in-
sight, and they have proven to be especially useful with children.
Yet some issues of validity and reliability need to be resolved if we are to go beyond
ideographic descriptive interpretations to utilize these techniques to their fullest poten-
tial. The scoring system described here is proposed in response to some of the funda-
mental considerations of validity and reliability.
The validity of projective techniques rests, in the first instance, on the projective
hypothesis (Chandler, in press); thus, initial validity is based on the assumption that
all
one’s expressions and productions reflect some aspect of the personality. But the ex-
ternalization phenomena may be only partial in some instances, and
so
the relative pro-
portion
of
externalization manifested may vary among individuals and even within the
same individual (if administered the same technique on two separate occasions). This
raises the question of whether it is appropriate to test the validity of projective tech-
niques by evaluating their ability to identify long-term stable personality traits.
If projective techniques are seen as global measures
of
personality, then the evidence
suggests that they fail to live up to these expectations, and thus may be invalid on that
count alone (Anastasi,
1982).
On the other hand, if projective techniques are seen as
estimates of current motivational and emotional concerns (Obrzut
&
Cummings,
1983),
Send reprint requests to Louis A. Chandler, Psychoeducational Clinic, University of Pittsburgh,
5D
Forbes
Quadrangle, Pittsburgh, PA
15260.