Five Factors in Sentence Completion Test Categories: Toward Rapprochement between Trait and Maturational Approaches to Personality

Ego level is a maturational construct assessed using sentence completions. The five factors are relatively static and are typically assessed using ratings or questionnaires. The current investigations explored relations between these two approaches using the Sentence Completion Test (SCT). In the first of two studies, persons with extreme scores on the five factors could be readily identified from the SCT. In the second study, measures of the five factors were derived from the response categories that are generated in the standard scoring of the SCT. These category-based measures converged with both the Revised NEO Personality Inventory and an existing content analytic measure of the five factors. These results suggest both that a developmentally tuned approach to measuring the five factors may be productive and that there is meaningful variation in the routinely scored (but typically discarded) SCT category ratings.