Explorations in personality by the sentence completion method

Abstract

Payne's completion blank was revised and extended to consist of 64-items. (The final questionnaire is for use with individuals 12 years and above, and administration is effective in groups.) Test validation work was done on 670 high school students; interpretation and evaluation of the obtained experimental data followed H. A. Murray's schema, thus permitting translation of the sentence completion data into quantitative results. Students were rated by teachers on the various items of Murray's categories, and linear correlations were obtained between these and the scores on the completion questionnaire. Pearson r 's ranged from .295 to .95, with an average r of .79 for the girls and .82 for the boys. Consistency r 's were obtained for a group of 44 persons between the first test and one given 8 months later. Corrected for attenuation, these were .82 for the girls and .76 for the boys. The emotionally and socially maladjusted individuals exhibited the greatest changes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)