The impact of context on draw-a-person drawings: Focus on size

• Main Authors: Desingaño, Armi Grace B., Cataquis, Rosalie E., Legaspi, Estesa Xaris Q., Ong, Aileen Grace, Reyes, Jose Alberto S.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Draw-A-Person Test; Projective techniques; Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/12976
• Institution: De La Salle University

Despite evidences of weakness prevailing over the strengths of projective techniques in its scientific standards, its popularity still cannot be denied among many practitioners. In order to deal with the issue of validity of projective tests in measuring personality traits, the study focused on interpreting size of draw-a-person test will vary across context, thus will not be held reliable to measure self-esteem. This experimental research utilized crossover design. Contexts were specified according to drawings asked by a young child, an art teacher, and a counselor. Participants were 40 college students, randomly assigned on varying order to being exposed to the treatments. Friedman test and Wilcoxon signed ranks test were used to identify significant differences in size of drawings that occurred across contexts. Results revealed that sizes of figure drawings were contextually defined. Further, it implied that size of human figure drawings cannot be held as a reliable measure of a person's self-esteem.