Considering the level of demand in the evaluation in selective processes and the lack of measurement instruments to meet these demands (Santos, 2016), psychological tests should ideally gather the wide range of spontaneous manifestations, typical of the
projective tests (Formiga & Mello, 2000; Miguel, 2014; Pinto, 2014), which would allow collective application, as well as the required objectivity and standardization.
Using the scores from the Projectire Test of Work Ethic and the Managers' Performance Appraisal Ratings, a chi-square contingency table test showed that high scorers on the
Projective Test were likely to get high performance ratings from their managers.
Projective testing seems to have led a bifurcated existence over the past decade, i.e., attitudes toward
projective tests have been blatantly negative in professional training settings yet guardedly positive in clinical practice (Hardwood et al., 2011).
Nevertheless, Skinner (1936, 1953/2003) still listed the advantages of such an instrument, considering that
projective tests create a laboratory situation, enabling control over stimuli in the observation of behaviour and facilitating the emergence of behaviours that are not known by the subject, especially the verbal ones.
(25) We believe that there is a need in South Africa for more and valid tests of psychological constructs other than intelligence, such as personality inventories,
projective tests and self-report measures of emotional variables such as anxiety, anger, etc., for use in all cultural groups.
Cartoons and stick figures are useless when analyzing drawings as
projective tests and are hypothesized to be an avoidance technique by not becoming personally involved with the examiner (Kopptiz, 1968).
Limitations of
projective tests include the extensive training required for their proper administration, scoring, and interpretation; demands on the clinician's time in administering and scoring them; controversies in scoring methods; variability in interpretation among clinicians; validity of psychoanalytic theory; lack of validity scales; susceptibility to coaching and malingering (particularly with presence of the Internet); and inability to assess cognitive deficits.
Also, instructions are provided for authors who wish to retain copyright to a new test or questionnaire, while caution is still advised for use of commercial intelligence or
projective tests.
They appeared "overtly adult," trying to "play the mother," but often remaining only "the deprived little girl." On their
projective tests, as in their relations with their children, some continued to be "fixed more on a sibling level than on a maternal level." In one extreme case, a forty-year-old who had long been an auxiliary mother to her brothers readily acknowledged that she had become only "one of the children in her own home." She recalled that shortly after her first child was born, she had already begun to cede "the mothering and physical care" of the infant to her husband.
For example, it is elementary that psychological tests tend to be grouped into categories called objective and
projective tests.
Although the use of
projective tests remains controversial, and evaluations drawn from them must be regarded cautiously, it seems unlikely that more extensive psychological testing would have detected unbalanced mental states in all of the percipients.
The orientation of the book can be conveyed by a couple of quotations: 'only factor-analytic tests are worthy of consideration'; '
projective tests were never based on reason'.
