Identifying Personality Characteristics and Psychopathology 289unable to recognize or to express in direct communication”
(Rohde, 1946, p. 170). The Rohde Sentence Completion Test
served as a model for many similar instruments developed
subsequently, and, as described by Rohde (1948), use of
those that were available during the 1940s was stimulated
by the impact of World War II. It has already been noted
that the impetus for designing performance-based personality
assessment instruments was largely intellectual curiosity
rather than civilian or military needs, and such was the case
with sentence completion tests. However, as a brief self-
administered measure that provided relatively unstructured
assessment of personality characteristics, the sentence com-
pletion was found to be extremely helpful in evaluating and
planning treatment for the vast number of psychological ca-
sualties seen in military installations during the war and cared
for in its aftermath in Veterans Administrations Hospitals.
For many years, the best known and most widely used
sentence completion has been the Rotter Incomplete Sen-
tences Blank (RISB), which was developed by Julian Rotter
in the late 1940s and first published in 1950, and for which
adult, college, and high school forms are available (Rotter,
Lah, & Rafferty, 1992). The authors provide a scoring system
for the RISB that yields an overall adjustment score, but in
practice the instrument is most commonly interpreted by the
inspection method that characterizes the typical application
of picture-story and figure-drawing instruments; that is, ex-
aminers read the content of the items and form impressions
of what respondents’ completions might signify concerning
their personality characteristics. Beyond published studies
demonstrating modest validity of the RISB as a measure of
adjustment, there has been little accumulation of empirical
evidence to support inferring any specific personality charac-
teristics from it, nor has there been much progress in docu-
menting the reliability of RISB findings and establishing
normative standards for them.
Interview Methods
As elaborated in Volume 10 of this Handbook, psychological
assessment is a data-gathering process that involves integrat-
ing information gleaned not only from the types of tests dis-
cussed thus far, but also from interview methods, behavioral
observations, collateral reports, and historical documents. Of
these, interviewing and observing people are the most widely
used assessment methods for attempting to learn something
about them. Although being discussed here in relation to
identifying personality characteristics and psychopathol-
ogy, interview methods are also commonly employed in as-
sessing intellectual and neuropsychological functioning and
aptitudes, achievement, and interests. Unlike psychological
testing, interviewing is not a method uniquely practiced by
psychologists, but rather an evaluative procedure employed
by many different kinds of professionals for various purposes
and by people in general who have some reason to assess
another person, like a father interviewing a suitor for his
daughter’s hand to gauge his suitability as a son-in-law.
By including both a self-report component, consisting of
what people say about themselves, and a performance-based
component, consisting of how they go about saying it, as-
sessment interviews provide abundant clues to what a person
is like. As a source of important assessment information, no
battery of psychological tests can fully replace oral interac-
tions between respondents and skilled interviewers, and most
assessment professionals consider the interview an essential
element of a psychological evaluation. In their historical
development, formal interview methods emerged first in a
relatively unstructured format and subsequently in relatively
structured formats as well.Relatively Unstructured FormatsMore than most persons using interviews for evaluative pur-
poses, psychologists and other mental health professionals
have traditionally favored relatively unstructured interview-
ing methods. The popularity of unstructured inquiry can be
credited to the influence of two of the most significant figures
in the history of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
and Carl Rogers (1902–1987). Freud (1913/1958) recom-
mended a free associationmethod for conducting psychoan-
alytic treatment sessions that consists of instructing people to
report whatever thoughts or feelings come to mind. Rogers
(1942, 1951) proposed a nondirectivemethod for conducting
client-centered therapy in which the therapist’s interventions
consist mainly of reflecting clients’ statements back to them.
Although based on markedly different ways of conceptualiz-
ing human behavior and the psychotherapeutic process, free
association and nondirective methods share in common an
open-ended approach that provides minimal guidance to
people concerning what or how much they should say.
Although developed for treatment purposes, free associa-
tion and nondirective techniques subsequently proved valuable
as well for obtaining information in assessment interviews.
Even though both techniques must usually be supplemented
with focused questions to clarify specific points of information,
they typically elicit ideas, attitudes, and recollections that
would not have emerged in response to direct questioning. The
psychoanalytic tradition has generated a substantial literature
on psychodynamic approaches to assessment interviewing,
perhaps the best known and most highly respected of which is
Sullivan’s (1954)The Psychiatric Interview. Rogers’ attention