Developing a Scale to Measure Total Impression Of Synthetic House-tree-person Drawings

• Published in: Social behavior and personality Vol. 44; no. 1; pp. 19 - 28
• Main Authors: Kato, Daiki, Suzuki, Mikie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Palmerston North Scientific Journal Publishers 01-01-2016; Scientific Journal Publishers, Ltd; Scientific Journal Publishers Ltd
• Subjects: Adolescents; Clinical psychology; Experiments; Graduate students; Impression formation (Psychology); Japan; Personality; Projection; Psychological research; Studies; Synthetic House-Tree-Person Drawing; Total Impression; Trees; Validity
• ISSN: 0301-2212; 1179-6391
• DOI: 10.2224/sbp.2016.44.1.19

We developed a scoring scale for the method of total impression of projective drawing. We focused especially on the Synthetic House-Tree-Person (S-HTP) projective drawing technique. First, we asked 7 clinical psychology graduate students to write down key words that they associated
with total impressions of S-HTP drawings. Second, we selected 35 items based on these words and developed the Scale for Total Impression of Drawings (STID). Using the STID, 6 clinical psychologists rated 30 S-HTP pictures drawn by Japanese junior high school students. Finally, we selected
12 descriptive words as items and results of confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the STID was divided into 4 subscales we labeled as vitality, reality, themes, and gentleness. These converged with 2 higher factors of emotional stability and context consistency. Fit indexes of the model
were sufficient.