ABSTRACT

G. Kelly (1958) writes:‘When the subject is asked to guess what the examiner is thinking, we call it an objective test; when the examiner tries to guess what the subject is thinking we call it a projective device.’ The personality inventories, attitude scales and interests tests discussed in the previous chapter can all be thought of as measuring the Subject's self-concepts and concepts of others, but they also require him to translate these concepts into the psychologist's frame of reference; that is, they show how closely his attitudes conform to the psychologist's notions of an extravert, an authoritarian, etc. Projective devices, in Kelly's view, try to show how the Subject himself structures or codifies his experiences, though we would add that such devices are still apt to tell us as much about the psychologist as about his Subject, since the responses have to be interpreted in terms of a depth-oriented or other theory. A number of techniques are con-sidered in this chapter which perhaps allow more direct expression of the personal conceptual system than those described in Chapter 10. They have not been employed to anything like the same extent as self-report, behavioural or projective techniques in counselling and selection, or even in clinical work; hence much less is known about their potentialities and limitations. Thus we shall be concerned more with possible tools than well-tried ones; and in particular with applications or extensions of Q-technique, the Semantic Differential and the Rep test.