Twenty Statements Test

Self and identity are two concerns of both psychology and sociology, enabling the researcher to see how people place themselves in social categories and [Page 1148]reflect upon who they are. The Twenty Statements Test (sometimes called the “Who am I?” test) is one of many instruments devised to measure the concept of self. It was introduced by symbolic interactionist sociologists Manford Kuhn and Thomas McPartland (1954), who wished to make George Herbert Mead's (a leading pragmatic philosopher) concept of the self more rigorous and operational.

Subjects are asked to write down the first 20 statements that come into their mind in answer to the question “Who Am I?” They are told that there are no right or wrong answers. The test is an open-ended instrument in which answers listed can be nouns or adjectives. In their early work, Kuhn and McPartland predicted that with increasing age and with growing social change, adjectival responses (e.g., cheerful, religious, existentially aware) would be used more frequently than substantive noun responses (e.g., wife, student, man).

Theorists of self are especially interested in how ideas about self change. In traditional worlds, “premodern identities” may often be taken for granted. People know who they are, defining themselves through traditions and religion, with identities being shared and communal, given as part of the world. Such identities are not seen as a problem and are usually just taken for granted. By contrast, as modernity develops, human individuality and individual identity become more important. Increasingly, self-reflection upon just who one is becomes an issue. The Twenty Statements Test was meant as a research tool into such questions.

The instrument is one of a great many tools for measuring the self and is not used very much these days. Although it does allow for a broad, sweeping depiction of a sense of self, it is very basic. It has been criticized for not taking into account (a) the situated nature of the self, which changes from context to context; (b) the role of significant others in shaping what can be said; and (c) the problems of coding and content analysis, which are problems commonly associated with an open-ended questionnaire.