In June of 2015, Chris Piotrowski published his article titled On the Decline of Projective Techniques in Professional Psychology Training in the North American Journal of Psychology. Piotrowski identified the Rorschach Ink Blot Test, sentence completion methods, and the Thematic Apperception Test as some examples of projective assessments in the field of Psychology (Piotrowski, 2015). The author shares how projective testing and assessment methods have been an accepted approach in Psychology for the past 75 years. However, there has been a decline in interest and use of these methods in the classroom and professional internship sites for the past decade (Piotrowski, 2015). The author introduces several theories that …show more content…
261). Beyond the health care policies, updates in the professional Psychology curriculum had a hand in the reduction of projective assessments in the classroom and at internship sites. “In 2000, the APA Division 12 Task force on Assessment recommended that training in projective assessment methods should be excluded from the graduate clinical curriculum. Interestingly, about this time, several authors called for a moratorium on teaching projective tests” (Piotrowski, 2015, p. 262). With mandates coming from a sanctioned task force on assessment and pressure from several scholarly authors, it is not surprising that projective assessment quietly was reduced in the classroom. Additionally, many of the seasoned faculty who did appreciate projective assessment are retiring which leaves no one in the classroom talking about the importance or training skills of projective assessment. With more and more empirical research being completed, projective assessment, which by definition relies on creativity and subjectivity, was bound to become a …show more content…
With that being said, projective assessments are still briefly touched upon in counseling textbooks and I remember my Internship site spending almost $1,000 to have the complete Rorschach Ink Blot test. Perhaps because counselors are more interested in a developmental approach while psychologists are more interested in a data approach, I will not have to worry about the disappearance of projective assessments from my curriculum either while I’m a student or maybe someday in the future as an instructor. Projective assessments simply are unable to give the empirical data that psychologists are typically looking