288 Assessment Psychology
measured by the amount of accurate detail in a young per-
son’s drawing of a human figure. The Draw-a-Man was later
revised by Harris (1963), who suggested having respondents
draw pictures of a woman and of themselves, in addition to
drawing a man, and expanded Goodenough’s scoring system
and standardization. Most recently the Goodenough-Harris
was further updated by Naglieri (1988) to include representa-
tive norms for assessing cognitive development in young
people age 5 to 17.
The Draw-a-Man was adapted for purposes of personality
assessment by Karen Machover (1902–1996), who in 1948
rechristened the measure as the Draw-a-Person (DAP) and
introduced the notion that human figure drawings convey in
symbolic ways aspects of a respondent’s underlying needs,
attitudes, conflicts, and concerns. She believed that for per-
sons of all ages and not just children, significant meaning can
be attached to structural features of drawings (e.g., where fig-
ures are placed on the page) and the manner in which various
parts of the body are drawn (e.g., a disproportionately large
head). Whereas Machover’s approach to DAP interpretation
consisted of qualitative hypotheses concerning the symbolic
significance of figure drawing characteristics, subsequent
developments that were focused mainly on refining this in-
strument for use in evaluating young people provided quanti-
tative scoring schemes for the instrument. Notable among
these were a formulation of 30 specific indicators of emo-
tional disturbance (Koppitz, 1968) and the construction of a
Screening Procedure for Emotional Disturbance (SPED;
Naglieri, McNeish, & Bardos, 1991). The DAP-SPED is an
actuarially derived and normatively based system comprising
55 scorable items and intended as a screening test for classi-
fying young people age 6 to 17 with respect to their likeli-
hood of having adjustment difficulties that call for further
evaluation.
Particular interest in the assessment of young people was
reflected in several other variations of Goodenough’s original
method, two of which have become fairly widely used. One
of these is the House-Tree-Person (HTP) test devised by
Buck (1948), in which children are asked to draw a picture of
a house and a tree as well as a person, in the expectation that
drawings of all three objects provide symbolic representa-
tions of important aspects of a young person’s world. The
other is the Kinetic Family Drawing (KFD) formalized by
Burns and Kaufman (1970), in which respondents are in-
structed to draw a picture of their whole family, including
themselves, doing something.
Also of note is a commonly used procedure suggested by
Machover in which people taking any of these figure drawing
tests are asked in addition to make up a story about the peo-
ple they have drawn or to answer specific questions about
them (e.g., “What is this person like?”). When this procedure
is followed, figure drawings take on some of the characteris-
tics of picture-story techniques, and, like picture stories, they
are despite recent efforts at quantification most commonly in-
terpreted in practice by an inspection technique in which per-
sonality characteristics are inferred primarily from subjective
impressions of noteworthy or unusual features of the figures
drawn. As a consequence, figure drawings remain a largely
unvalidated assessment method that has remained popular
despite having thus far shown limited psychometric sound-
ness (see Handler, 1995).Sentence Completion MethodsSentence completion methods of assessing personality and
psychopathology originated in the earliest efforts to develop
tests of intelligence. Herman Ebbinghaus (1897), the pioneer-
ing figure in formal study of human memory, developed a
sentence completion test for the purpose of measuring intel-
lectual capacity and reasoning ability in children, and Binet
and Simon included a version of Ebbinghaus’ sentence com-
pletion task in their original 1905 scale. Sentence comple-
tions have been retained in the Stanford-Binet, and a variety
of sentence completion tasks have also found use to the pre-
sent day as achievement test measures of language skills.
The extension of the sentence completion method to as-
sess personality as well as intellectual functioning was
stimulated by Carl Jung (1916), the well-known Swiss psy-
choanalyst and one-time close colleague of Freud who
founded his own school of thought, known as “analytic psy-
chology,” and whose writings popularized his use of a “word
association” technique for studying underlying aspects of a
person’s inner life. This technique was formalized in the
United States by Grace Kent and Aaron Rosanoff (1910),
who developed a standard 100-item list called the Free Asso-
ciation Test and compiled frequency tables for different kinds
of responses given by a sample of 1,000 nonpatient adults.
The apparent richness of word association tasks in reveal-
ing personality characteristics suggested to many assessors
that replacing the word-word format with full sentences writ-
ten as completions to brief phrases (e.g., “I like.. .”; “My
worst fear is.. .”) would result in an even more informative
assessment instrument. Numerous sentence completion tests
were constructed during the 1920s and 1930s and used for a
variety of purposes, but with little systematic effort or stan-
dardization. The first carefully constructed and validated
measure of this kind was developed in the late 1930s by
Amanda Rohde and, like other performance-based tests of
personality, was intended to “reveal latent needs, sentiments,
feelings, and attitudes which subjects would be unwilling or