Roberts Apperception Test for Children

The Roberts Apperception Test for Children (RATC), published by Western Psychological Services, is a projective test used to assess children's psychological development. Its primary purpose is to assess children's perceptions of common interpersonal situations as an aid to general personality description and clinical decision making. Interpretation of the RATC is based on the “projective hypothesis,” an assumption that children, when presented with ambiguous drawings of children and adults in everyday interaction, will project their characteristic thoughts, concerns, conflicts, and coping styles into the stories they create. During the test, the individual is presented with a series of drawings and is asked to create stories describing what is happening in each situation, what led up to it, and how it will end. Usually, the child is asked to explain what the main characters are thinking and feeling. For example, a child is pictured sitting at a desk, surrounded by books and papers, apparently engaged in homework. In another picture, a child is pictured kneeling in front of, and clasping, a female figure who has her arms around the child in an apparently comforting posture.

The test's standardized and formally coded content scales indicate where the child is on a continuum of social understanding. Typically, as children become more socially experienced, their stories reflect greater awareness of social convention, more differentiated themes, and clearer resolution of themes and conflicts. Moreover, the inclusion of clinical scales calls attention to the likely presence of social and emotional problems that are outside the norm. Thus, the RATC assesses two independent dimensions: adaptive social perception and the presence of maladaptive or atypical social perception. The RATC takes approximately 20–30 minutes to administer when all stimulus cards are presented. After recording the stories, the clinician scores the responses for the presence or absence of specific characteristics. Stories are rated on seven scales: Theme Overview, Problem Identification, Emotion, Available Resources, Resolution, Outcome, and Unusual or Atypical Responses. Scores are plotted onto a profile sheet that shows T-score equivalents of raw scores and a shaded area between 40T and 60T denoting the “normal range.”

The RATC was standardized on a sample of 200 children who had been described as “generally well adjusted” by their teachers. This standardization sample has been criticized by a number of researchers who have shown that the RATC is of questionable value for distinguishing between clinical and nonclinical populations, and they have suggested that the norms not be used for clinical diagnosis. There have also been debates about the reliability and validity research on the RATC, despite it being the second most popular projective test used with children in the USA. However, in the Roberts-2 (the second edition of the RATC, which was published in late 2005), new norms, grouped by age and sex, are based on a sample of 1,000 children and adolescents (age extended to 18 years), and this test is better representative in terms of gender, ethnicity, and parental education than the original sample. The Roberts-2 also includes data on a clinically referred sample of more than 500 children and adolescents. The authors suggest that this new evidence supports the use of the Roberts-2 in both research on the development of social understanding in normal children, and the clinical assessment of children experiencing adjustment problems. The Roberts-2 also includes new test pictures that feature current hair and clothing styles but retain the thematic content of the original pictures, as well as three parallel versions of the test pictures—one showing White children, one featuring Black children, and a third depicting Hispanic children.

...