Sentence completion tests are a class of semi-structured
projective techniques
In psychology, a projective test is a personality test designed to let a person respond to ambiguous stimuli, presumably revealing hidden emotions and internal conflicts projected by the person into the test. This is sometimes contrasted with a s ...
. Sentence completion tests typically provide respondents with beginnings of sentences, referred to as "stems", and respondents then complete the sentences in ways that are meaningful to them. The responses are believed to provide indications of
attitudes,
beliefs,
motivations
Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-dire ...
, or other
mental states
A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definiti ...
. Therefore, sentence completion technique, with such
advantage
Advantage may refer to:
* Advantage (debate), an argument structure in competitive debate
* Mechanical advantage, in engineering, the ratio of output force to input force on a system
* Advantage of terrain, in military use, a superiority in elev ...
, promotes the respondents to disclose their concealed feelings.
[Putthiwanit, C. (2012) Investigating consumer insight by using completion techniques: A pilot study of a motorcycle accessory shop in Thailand. International Review of Management and Marketing, 2, 92-8.] Notwithstanding, there is debate over whether or not sentence completion tests elicit responses from conscious thought rather than unconscious states. This debate would affect whether sentence completion tests can be strictly
categorized as projective tests.
A sentence completion test form may be relatively short, such as those used to assess responses to
advertisements, or much longer, such as those used to assess personality. A long sentence completion test is the Forer Sentence Completion Test, which has 100 stems. The tests are usually administered in booklet form where respondents complete the stems by writing words on paper.
The structures of sentence completion tests vary according to the length and relative generality and wording of the sentence stems. Structured tests have longer stems that lead respondents to more specific types of responses; less structured tests provide shorter stems, which produce a wider variety of responses.
History
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Hermann Ebbinghaus (24 January 185026 February 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describ ...
is generally credited with developing the first sentence completion test in 1897.
[Rhode, A.R. (1957) The Sentence Completion Method. New York: The Ronald Press 1957; Lah, M.I. (1989). Sentence Completion Tests. In C.S. Newmark (Ed.), Major psychological assessment instruments, Vol II (pp 133-163). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.] Ebbinghaus's sentence completion test was used as part of an intelligence test.
[ Simultaneously, ]Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...
's word association test may also have been a precursor to modern sentence completion tests. Moreover, in recent decades, sentence completion tests have increased in usage, in part because they are easy to develop and easy to administer. As of the 1980s, sentence completion tests were the eighty-fifth most widely used personality assessment
A personality test is a method of assessing human personality construct (psychology), constructs. Most personality assessment instruments (despite being loosely referred to as "personality tests") are in fact introspective (i.e., subjective) self ...
instruments.[Holaday, M., Smith, D.A. & Sherry, A. (2000). Sentence completion tests: A review of the literature and results of a survey of members of the society for personality assessment. Journal of Personality Assessment, 74, 371-383.; Lubin, B., Larsen, R.M. & Matarazzo, J.D. (1984). Patterns of psychological test usage in United States: 1935-1982. American Psychologist, 39, 451-454.] Another reason for the increased usage of sentence completion tests is because of their superiority to other measures in uncovering conflicted attitudes.[Lawrence C. Soley & Aaron Lee Smith (2008). Projective Techniques for Social Science and Business Research. Milwaukee: The Southshore Press.] Some sentence completion tests were developed as a way to overcome the problems associated with thematic apperception measures of the same constructs.[
]
Uses
The uses of sentence completion tests include personality analysis
Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...
, clinical applications, attitude assessment, achievement motivation
Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-dire ...
, and measurement of other constructs. They are used in several disciplines, including psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
, management
Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business.
Management includes the activities o ...
, education
Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty. Va ...
, and marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
.
Sentence completion measures have also been incorporated into non-projective applications, such as intelligence tests, language comprehension, and language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
and cognitive development tests.[
]
Examples
There are many sentence completion tests available for use by researchers. Some of the most widely used sentence completion tests include:
*Rotter Incomplete Sentence Blank
The Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank is a projective psychological test developed by Julian B. Rotter. It comes in three forms (for different age groups) and comprises 40 incomplete sentences usually only 1–2 words long, such as "''I regret .. ...
(assesses personality traits
In psychology, trait theory (also called dispositional theory) is an approach to the study of human personality. Trait theorists are primarily interested in the measurement of ''traits'', which can be defined as habitual patterns of behaviour, tho ...
; perhaps the most widely used of all sentence completion tests).
*Miner Sentence Completion Test
A miner is a person who extracts ore, coal, chalk, clay, or other minerals from the earth through mining. There are two senses in which the term is used. In its narrowest sense, a miner is someone who works at the rock face; cutting, blasting, ...
(measures managerial motivations
Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-dire ...
).
*Washington University Sentence Completion Test
The Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT) is a sentence completion test created by Jane Loevinger, which measures ego development along Loevinger's stages of ego development. The WUSCT is a projective test; a type of psychometric t ...
(WUSCT) from Jane Loevinger (measures ego development).
Data analysis, validity and reliability
The data collected from sentence completion tests can usually be analyzed either quantitatively
Quantitative research is a research strategy that focuses on quantifying the collection and analysis of data. It is formed from a deductive approach where emphasis is placed on the testing of theory, shaped by empiricist and positivist philosop ...
or qualitatively.[ Usually, sentence completion tests can be interpreted in two different ways: subjective-intuitive analysis of the underlying motivations projected in the subject's responses, or objective analysis by means of scores assigned to each completed sentence.][Gregory, J. Robert., Psychological Testing: History, Principles and App.ications. Ed. 5. Wheaton College. Wheaton, Illinois. Peterson: 2007] Multiple themes can occur in a short test, which gives the examinee multiple opportunities to reveal underlying motivations about each topic during data analysis. Of course, most sentence completion tests are much longer (anywhere from 40 to 100 stems) and contain more themes (anywhere from 4 to 15 topics).
Sentence completion tests usually include some formal coding procedure or manual. The validity of each sentence completion test must be determined independently and this depends on the instructions laid out in the scoring booklet.
Compared to positivist instruments, such as Likert-type scales, sentence completion tests tend to have high face validity
Validity or Valid may refer to:
Science/mathematics/statistics:
* Validity (logic), a property of a logical argument
* Scientific:
** Internal validity, the validity of causal inferences within scientific studies, usually based on experiments
** ...
(i.e., the extent to which measurement items accurately reflect the concept being measured). This is to be expected, because in many cases the sentence stems name or refer to specific objects and the respondent provides responses specifically focused on such objects.
References
{{reflist
Projective tests