Abstract
A special psychiatric rating form was constructed which would also be suitable for ratings made from Rorschach protocols only, called “blind” ratings, since the rater did not see the patient. Ratings were made independently by three psychiatrists but based on the same interview, while the Rorschach ratings were mace independently by two psychologists with special experience in Rorschach interpretation, If we define “agreement” arbitrarily as a correlation or chi square value at a better than .10 level of significance, there was agreement among the psychiatrists on almost a third of the scales, and consistency on one-fourth of the 59 scales. There was agreement among the Rorschach ratings on almost half of the scales. However, there was agreement between the psychiatric and Rorschach ratings on only 9 out of the 59 scales. These scales were concerned with: organization of thinking, pathognomic verbalizations, appropriateness of affect, anxiety, phobias, obsessions, direction of orientation (active or passive attitude), reality testing, and ego strength. It is noticeable that several of these items appear to call for global judgments about constructs for which precise definitions or simple diagnostic tests are lacking. No systematic individual differences among judges were found. The rating form contained 30 numerical and 29 categorical scales. There was a higher incidence of significant indices of agreement and consistency for the numerical than for the categorical scales.
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