Conferência 3 - TRADUZIDA (Prof. Dr. Patrick Fontan) - Introduction to the Comprehensive System Revised and CHESSSS 2

Prof. Dr. Patrick Fontan (Universities of Paris West Nanterre and Reims Champagne Ardennes) As comprehensive as Exner's approach to the Rorschach may be, he never considered the CS to be perfectly complete, and he called for further developments. This is precisely the task that the International Rorschach Institute has taken on with the Comprehensive System Revised (CS-R). One of Exner's considerable contributions was the introduction of norms for the test. Nevertheless, at present, psychologists who use the CS are in a delicate position: they can either use the American norms of the CS, which raises substantial questioning as to the intercultural adaptation of the test; they can also rely on the international norms with the inconvenience of avoiding the intercultural question; and alternatively, they might try to use published national norms "by hand" which is a difficult task and might potentially lead to psychometric accuracy issues. A starting point of the Comprehensive System Revised is the study of the actual differences between National Reference Samples. At the Institute we computed all possible differences between the samples published in the special 2007 edition of the Journal of Personality Assessment which represents more than 22,000 difference scores to consider. We demonstrated that most of these differences are non-negligible and therefore that it would be unwise to neglect cross-national differences between Rorschach Samples. Simultaneously we studied the magnitude of difference within and between countries in two different contexts (Finland vs. French speaking samples; Catalunya vs. Castiliano vs. Portugal & France) and found out that within countries differences are smaller than between countries. These results further confirmed the necessity to take national norms in Rorschach interpretation. However, because most Rorschach scores are not normally distributed published norms are not readily applicable to clinical practice. For example, it is quite difficult to precisely determine the percentile rank of a person who would have gave 3 Textures responses as compared to the Brazilian sample. To answer such questions with sufficient accuracy, we developed the Norm-Simulation technique which will be outlined in this conference. If the CS definitely meets psychometric requirements, in no instance can it be reduced to a mere psycho-technic instrument. The Rorschach has always been and remains a clinical tool and revisions were designed in this perspective as well. We present some revisions to administration and scoring guidelines. A substantial work was undertaken concerning interpretation routines. The Interpretation is now divided in 5 phases and includes two new clusters: the Validity Cluster and the Key Feature Cluster. The interpretive routines of original CS Clusters have been reworked to emphasize the psychologist’s clinical interpretive process and the number of steps has been reduced from 72 to 37. Finally, all these developments are included in the new computer program CHESSSS 2 which will be briefly presented.