Rorschach Test - the Rorschach Inkblot Method

Rorschach Test

The Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM) remains a commonly used projective device test in clinical assessment and personality research, despite ongoing controversy about the empirical support for the reliability and validity of its scoring systems. My position is that that it has good reliability and validity.

The Rorschach advantage over the other personality tests is that they do not assess the personality as a whole. For example, The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) researches personality and attitude, and The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a widely used measure of personality dispositions and interests based on Carl Jung's theory of types. In contrast to other personality assessments, the Rorschach can assess people's attitudes toward their environments, and detect psychotic or illogical thought patterns as well as internal and external conflicts and pressures (Exner, 2003). The RIM is immune to social desirability in that respondents generally do not know which responses to give to the ambiguous stimuli if they are intent on misrepresenting their personality characteristics in a particular direction. It is based on the premise that if an individual is presented with unfamiliar stimuli, which are prone to a variety of interpretations, he/she will interpret the stimuli on the basis of his/her own needs, feelings, experiences, prior conditioning, thought processes (Hiller, Rosenthal, and Bornstein, et al., 1999).

The demonstrated retest reliability, of regularly occurring Rorschach variables that have interpretive significance for trait dimensions of personality, has important implications for the instrument's intercoder agreement and its validity as well. The substantial stability coefficients shown by most Rorschach variables could not have been achieved without good agreement among the persons who coded the protocols used in the retest studies. The degree to which two sets of scores can correlate is always statistically limited by how reliable they are. Good reliability has been documented for Rorschach summary scores in a series of studies with both children and adults retested over intervals ranging from a few days to 3 years. Among adults, almost all of the variables coded in the Comprehensive System and conceptualized as relating to trait characteristics show substantial short-term and long-term stability, with retest correlations in excess of .75. Four core variables with major interpretive significance have had retest correlations of .90 or higher in either 1-year or 3-year retesting of non-patient adults (D-Score, X −%, Afr, and SumT ), and 15 other important core variables have had 1-year or 3-year retest correlations of .85 to .89 (R, X +%, Xu%, M, WSumC, EA, FC, SumV, FD, 3r+(2)/R, 2AB+Art+Ay, Zf, a, Sum6, and WSum6 (Exner, 2003; Viglione & Hilsenroth, 2001) .

With further respect to issues of validity, conceptually meaningful and practically useful correlates for numerous Rorschach variables have been demonstrated in a series of global and focused meta-analytic studies reported between 1986 and 1999. In the most recent and extensive of the global meta-analytic studies, Hiller, Rosenthal, and Bornstein, et al. (1999) analyzed a random sample of Rorschach and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) research studies published from 1977 to 1997 and including 2,276 Rorschach protocols and 5,007 MMPI protocols. The sample was limited to studies that had been based on some reasonable expectation of finding associations between variables and in which at least one of the variables was not a test score. The analysis by Hiller and colleagues (1999) yielded unweighted mean validity coefficients of .29 for Rorschach variables and .30 for MMPI variables. These researchers concluded that these effect sizes (a) demonstrate equivalent general validity for the RIM and the MMPI, (b) warrant confidence in using both instruments for their intended purposes, and (c) "are about as large as can be expected for personality tests" (p. 291).

Despite the accumulation of empirical findings demonstrating the reliability and validity of Rorschach findings, there are Rorschach critics who remain unconvinced of the psychometric soundness of the instrument (Garb, 1999; Lilienfeld, Fowler & Lohr, 2003). These critics appear immune to persuasion by any amount of data attesting the scientific merit of the RIM, and their focus falls instead on the results of poorly designed research studies and inappropriate applications of Rorschach testing (Weiner, 2000). They seem unacquainted with the practical utility of Rorschach findings, which would not exist if it were an unreliable or invalid instrument. In this last regard, well-designed research in a variety of settings continues with regularity to affirm the utility of the RIM for providing valid assessment of personality characteristics and facilitating decision making, differential diagnosis, and treatment planning and evaluation (Ganellen, 2001;Weiner, 2000). These sentiments are echoed in the current edition of the Mental Measurements Yearbook, in which Hess, Zachar, and Kramer (2001) conclude, "The Rorschach, employed with the Comprehensive System, is a better personality test than its opponents are willing to acknowledge" (p. 1037).

The Rorschach assessment would be chosen over other personality assessments