Objective and Projective Test
Rene' Butler
Kaplan University
Testing, Measurement, and Assessment
PS-505
James Julian
June 30, 2014 Objective and Projective Test
1. The historical use of the terms objective and projective to classify a personality test, and the problems with such classification. Since the beginning of mankind, there have been attempts to figure out how and why people differ. People who study personality traits tend to focus on various aspects of human behaviors such as, social interactions, development, learning, and culture. In addition, they study physiology, genetics, and pathology. They look at all aspects of being human and try to classify, organize, and understand them. Historically …show more content…

Objective terminology would better be described by using the terms, self-report inventory or patient-rated questionnaires. These terms have been applied almost exclusively to questionnaires that are completed by the client. These authors suggest that assessors should differentiate between self-report inventories and inventories completed by knowledgeable informants. “Given that sources of information in personality assessment are far from interchangeable,” it would be optimal to further differentiate all questionnaire methods by specifying the type of informant providing judgments” (Meyer & Kurtz, 2006, p. 224) It is difficult to identify a single term that would define the term projective, because of all of the diverse features of the test. Some of the terms that Meyer and Kurtz (2006) devise are performance and behavioral tasks, constructive methods, free response measures, expressive personality tests, implicit methods, and attribute tests (Meyer & Kurtz, 2006). The problem is that psychologists have not come to an agreement on which term best describes these assessment tools. At least this terminology is better than projective to describe drawing one’s family, telling stories in response to pictures, and stating what an inkblot looks like. Meyer and Kurtz (2006) makes it clear when they state, “Applying a global and undifferentiated term to such a diverse array of assessment tasks seems akin to