The scoring systems described in this book are usually applied to written thematic apperception materials obtained by the direct testing of groups or individuals. Veroff (chapter 6) has described how they can be adapted for use in survey research, which greatly expands their applicability. This chapter describes how they have been used to analyze archival historical materials, personal and cultural documents, and everyday verbal material such as conversations, reported dreams, and even transcriptions of television programs.

WHY USE HISTORICAL MATERIALS?

Problems of direct testing

Often we want to make psychological inferences about people and groups to whom we lack access, groups that cannot be studied by any kind of direct testing or survey interviewing. Prominent persons such as authors or political leaders usually cannot be tested; and when they can, ethical considerations would make it difficult to disclose the results. Large groups or cultures are too amorphous and too expensive to study by direct testing. And (to adapt a quotation from Glad, 1973) by their deaths, historical figures and groups have taken with them their achievement and power motivation, their integrative complexity and their explanatory style. There are also situations where testing, even with thematic apperception methods, is possible but undesirable because it arouses test-taking or self-presentation sets, suspiciousness, defensiveness, or anxiety (Lundy, 1988).