Sunday, September 17, 2006

Sentence completion test

When I blogged a few days ago about a psychologist studying bloggers I listed a set of questions that I answered as part of the study. I also wondered in that entry how those questions were supposed to measure anything.

After a little bit of Googling, I discovered those questions were one version of the Washington University (St. Louis, MO) Sentence Completion Test (or WUSCT for short). This test was developed by Jane Loevinger in 1970 for use in measuring a person’s personal organization and personality development, sometimes called Ego Development in the literature. However, this Ego is not to be confused with the Ego developed by Freud or that used in the common vernacular.

According to the literature, this test has high reliability and consistency when scored by properly trained people. It does not lend itself well to automated scoring by machine. Since one of the scoring manuals is over 450 pages, I’m not likely to try to score my own answers.

How did people ever find out about such things before the Internet? Before Google?

1 comment:

  1. Six degrees of separation.

    Ask someone you think might know and hope they point you towards the more likely person. (Of course without email that was harder too.)

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