ABSTRACT
The Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM; Rorschach, 1942) is a uniquely valuable assessment method in clinical and forensic practice, which evaluates implicit aspects of personality functioning that are frequently untapped by more widely used self-report inventories (Bornstein, 2002, 2011; Mihura, 2012). The RIM is the most commonly used (Archer, Buffington-Vollum, Stredny & Handel, 2006) and well-validated performance-based assessment method in forensic settings (Gacono & Evans, 2008). When used within a contemporary, empirically based scoring and interpretive system, the RIM has been found to meet evidentiary standards necessary for use in court (Erard, 2012; McCann & Evans, 2008; Meloy, 2008; Ritzler, Erard, & Pettigrew, 2002a, 2002b) and has been found to be useful in both clinical and forensic settings (Status of the Rorschach, 2005). The Rorschach is especially valuable in forensic settings because 1) the RIM was not devised to be content valid and rests on completely different assumptions than is the case for a questionnaire or self-report test (Bornstein, 2011), and 2) RIM interpretation is based on a large body of empirical research connecting particular types of responses validly to important external benchmarks (Mihura, Meyer, Dumitrascu, & Bombel, 2013). Combined with self-report measures with substantial validity, the RIM offers a distinctly different way of assessing
characteristics that provide incremental validity over self-report methods (see Weiner, 2013). Because forensic psychological assessment is particularly sensitive to distortions resulting from response style, the RIM also offers an assessment approach that is often much less vulnerable to distortion than self-report methods (Ganellen, 2008; Schultz, this volume).
