Date of Award

2009

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Education and Human Services

First Advisor

Ingersoll, R. Elliot

Subject Headings

Sentence Completion Test, Ego (Psychology), Developmental psychology, Ego development theory, Sentence completion test integral, SCTi-MAP, Washington University sentence completion test, WUSCT, Scoring manual construction

Abstract

Ego development theory, proposed by Jane Loevinger (1966, 1976), is the study of how an individual's processing of experience and meaning-making of the world develops. The tool used to measure ego development is the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT), and its scoring manual is the foundation for the high validity and reliability of the measurement tool. Susanne Cook-Greuter (1999b) constructed a modified version of the WUSCT, the Sentence Completion Test Integral (SCTi-MAP), and in order to continue the trend of strong psychometric properties, a scoring manual needs to be constructed for the new sentence stems found on the SCTi-MAP. This thesis constructs a scoring manual for the SCTi-MAP sentence stem, "a good boss-". The first step in creating a scoring manual was to sort the data, which consisted of 836 responses to the sentence stem, into categories within the different stages of ego development. Next, any new categories that seemed to emerge during the sort process were defined, and all of the existing categories were organized into a logical sequence within each stage. The final step was to write the scoring manual and perform basic statistics on the frequency distribution of responses within each category. The results of this thesis include the construction of a scoring manual for the sentence stem "a good boss-", and a frequency distribution of the stem responses, which provides evidence that the sentence stem "a good boss-" has internal validity, as it seems to produce a similar distribution of response data as the assessment tool as a whole provides. This thesis project enhances the reliability and validity of the SCTi-MAP and adds data and conclusions to the pool of research available for the study of ego development theory

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