Does this story really reveal who I am?

The thematic apperception test (TAT) is the first personality test I learned from my psychology class.

This test is a kind of projective psychological test, which is used to help understand people’s personalities by assessing their motives, needs, world views and so on. It consists of 32 black-and-white pictures of ambiguous figures: men, women or children. During a test, the tester chooses a set of cards from these 32 cards and presents them to the examinees, asking them to tell dramatic stories about these pictures. These stories should answer questions such as: what is happening? what is the cause of it? What is the character in the picture thinking? However, the tester should let the examinees imagine freely and not ask them these questions directly. The tester then records the stories told by the examinees and later interprets them or score them.

I still remember the picture my teacher showed me in class. In the picture, there was a women coming out from a very dark room. Her left hand was pulling the door, and she lifted her right hand to cover her face. Her posture is strange and maybe a little sad. When I was trying to come up with a sad story, my teacher laughed. He said that in his story, the woman hit her head because the room was so dark that she couldn’t see. This sure is a creative and humorous answer, but can this story help show my teacher’s personality? Can the sad story of mine really reveal who I am?

After listening to several lectures from PSYC 406, I realize that the reliability and validity of TAT are weak.

Let’s first talk about the reliability of the TAT. The temporal stability can be low for this test, according to the test-retest reliability. It is hard for the examinee to tell the same story in two different occasions, because his or her internal state (emotions, mood...) can easily change. Therefore, if the examinee redo the test, the results will likely not be correlated. The internal consistency can be low as well. These pictures from TAT are too different from each other and it is possible that two stories from one person will not correlate with each other at all, which means that the split-half reliability will probably be low. Also, it is hard for two testers to give correlating scores to the same story, since different testers can have different ways to interpret the story. There are scoring systems for the TAT, but scorers usually use their intuitions to interpret the story due to the complexity of the scoring system. So it is not surprising that the interscorer reliability is low.

As for validity, some studies found that the TAT is not helpful for diagnosis at all. It can only make weak predictions and thus it is low in validity.

So, can my sad story of the woman really reveal who I am? I think it is doubtful due to TAT’s low reliability and validity. This test should be used in caution, and other approaches should be used to examine its results.

Student Number: 260619777