A Comparison of the Murray-TAT and a New Thematic Apperception Test for Urban Hispanic Children

Abstract

Minority children's lack of responsiveness to projective tests has been attributed to underlying verbal deficits versus productivity on the TAT and the TEMAS (Tell-me-a-story), a new TAT depicting ethnic minority figures, cultural themes, and urban backgrounds. Results indicated that children were more responsive to TEMAS pictures than TAT pictures, and this effect was more enhanced for females than males. Children were more likely to respond in Spanish to the TEMAS and to switch from English on the TAT to Spanish on the TEMAS. Results support earlier findings of increased responsiveness of minority children to culturally relevant stimuli and also suggest a promising instrument for assessment of minority children.

Critical review of the TEMAS: A step within the development of thematic apperception instruments

“…Consistent with expectations, greater verbalization occurred when the stimulus materials were more closely identified with the ethnicity, gender, and age of the examinee (Costantino & Malgady, 1983;Costantino, Malgady, & Vasquez, 1981). In addition, greater verbalization on the TEMAS occurred for Spanish language dominant children when they responded in Spanish, suggesting that the limited verbalization often obtained on tests such as the TAT for ethnic minority respondents is related to factors other than cognitive variables.…”

Discriminant Analysis of Clinical Outpatients and Public School Children by TEMAS: A Thematic Apperception Test for Hispanics and Blacks

“…Earlier studies indicated that Hispanic and Black children are more verbally fluent on the TEMAS test than the TAT, but White children show no significant differences (Costantino & Malgad~, 1983;Costantino, Malgady, & Vazquez, 1981), thus setting a potential for valid personality assessment of minority children. Other studies established the reliability of TEMAS, some rudimentary evidence of concurrent validity (correlations with other personality measures), and clinical utility for predicting psychotherapeutic treatment outcomes (Malgady et al, 1984), Results of our study lend further support to the validity of the E M A S test for discriminating between clinical and nonclinical groups of minority children; classification accuracy was 89% for Hispanics and Blacks.…”

Imaginary pictures, real life stories: the FotoDialogo method

“…An example of a picture stimuli technique that takes into consideration specific cultural features is the Tell-Me-A-Story (TEMAS), a TAT-like test that comprises chromatic pictures depicting Hispanic/Latino characters interacting in familiar urban settings (Costantino, 1978). Studies conducted with the TEMAS technique demonstrated that Puerto Rican children are significantly more verbally fluent in telling stories about TEMAS pictures than about TAT pictures (Costantino et al, 1981;Costantino & Malgady, 1983;Malgady et al, 1984;Costantino et al, 2001).…”