Definition
A 36-item projective, psychometric test used to assess an individual’s placement along a continuum of psychological maturity referred to as ego development.
Introduction
The Washington University Sentence Completion Test (SCT; Loevinger and Wessler 1970) is a widely used projective technique for assessing personality (Vincent et al. 2015). The SCT consists of 36 sentence stems (e.g., “A woman (man) should always…” and “If I can’t get what I want…”) that are completed by the participant and rated using a comprehensive scoring manual. Using ogive rules (i.e., cumulative frequency), scores on each item are combined, and the respondent is classified into one of eight stages of development: Impulsive (E2), Self-Protective (E3), Conformist (E4), Self-Aware (E5), Conscientious (E6), Individualistic (E7), Autonomous (E8), or Integrated (E9) (Loevinger 1998; Vincent et al. 2015).
History
The origin of the SCT can be traced back to the Family Problems Scale, an...
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References
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Jorgenson, J. (2017). Washington University Sentence Completion Test. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_959-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_959-1
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