An Approach to the Validation of the Draw-a-Person Test

This study was designed to demonstrate that considerable freedom to discard human figure drawings from a group of drawings would increase the likelihood of a clinical psychologist correctly predicting levels of adjustment by the use of drawings. Subjects were twenty patients from Larned State Hospital, ten of whom were diagnosed as psychotic and ten diagnosed as neurotic, and ten students at Fort Hays Kansas State College comprising the normal group. Human figure drawings were collected from each subject and these in turn were submitted to a panel of four qualified clinical psychologists. Each judge followed two steps; two judges were forced to categorize all drawings first into the above named diagnostic categories and then to go back through the drawings and to discard drawings they felt to be diagnostically insignificant. The procedure was reversed for the other two judges. A significant difference was obtained for the total group on both the free- and forced-choice steps when compared to a chance level. The freedom to discard drawings, however, apparently had no effect on the validity as the differences did not approach statistical significance. In fact some of the differences were in the opposite direction; i.e. the judges performed better on the forced-choice step than on the free choice step