Scoring/ Interpretation of Thematic Apperceptive Techniques (Tats): A Review

Abstract

This paper highlights the importance of Thematic Apperceptive Techniques (TATs) in personality assessment and emphasizes that these techniques facilitate articulation, predict behavior in real life settings, contribute to incremental validity, less prone to faking or deliberate deception, and useful in intervention. Also, some issues affecting scientific credentials of these techniques are highlighted, viz., unsystematic use, false assumptions in critical literature, false information in general psychology textbooks, and some general issues which are hindrance in development of these techniques. Need for supportive research is highlighted, and as a step in this direction, this paper presents various scoring/interpretive approaches to TATs, retrieved using two large bibliographic databases, viz., SCOPUS and Google Scholar (GS). This paper is useful for researchers and clinicians who can gain by having knowledge of approaches to TATs evaluation. No such review exists which consolidates TATs in terms of scoring/ interpretation since its introduction, i.e., 1935. Finally, some suggestions for future research are also given.