Reliability and Validity of the Rorschach Assessment

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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 ...