Rorschach administration: a comparison of the effect of two instructions

The effect of administering the Rorschach Inkblot Method under 2 instructional sets was compared across 19 outcome measures. Sixty healthy participants randomly received either the short instruction "What might this be?" originally developed by Rorschach (1942) and recommended in the Comprehensive System (Exner, 1993), or a long instruction (Killingmo, 1980), which for many years has been the standard instruction in Norway. The short instruction produced significantly more questions to the examiner about the test and more brief protocols R < 14) than did the long one. However, for the traditional summary Rorschach scores no between-group differences were observed for the 2 instructional sets. It is suggested that if future studies of larger clinical and more representative samples demonstrate corresponding results, a more elaborate standard instruction might be preferable.