Construction of a test suitable for group administration which could detect those who are morbidly preoccupied with depressive thoughts would be extremely useful to ward administrators in hospitals where intensive psychotherapeutic contacts are the exception rather than the rule. This study is an attempt to assess a group screening device (sentence completion test) to identify those patients who may constitute suicidal risks.The D scale of the MMPI (Broida, 1954) and some aspects of responses to the Make-a-Picture-Story (MAPS) (Farberow, 1950) differentiated between suicidal and nonsuicidal patients. However, the few experimental studies with the TAT yielded negative results. Neither responses to Card 3BM (Broida, 1954) nor characteristics of the TAT heroes (Shneidman & Farberow, 1958) distinguished suicidal from control groups. There have been proposed in the literature various Rorschach signs and patterns that can be used to detect potential suicidal behavior (Hertz, 1948(Hertz, , 1949Piotrowski, 1950;White & Schreiber, 1952); however, other studies generally fail to confirm their validity (Fisher, 1951;Sakheim, 1955). Results indicate that Hertz's (1948) Configuration Technique is probably 1 This study was an individual hospital project of the Veterans Administration Psychiatric Evaluation Project, Richard L. Jenkins, Director. This paper was reviewed in the Veterans Administration and is published with the approval of the Chief Medical Director. The statements and conclusions of the author are the result of his own study and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or policy of the Veterans Administration. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Marcus P. Rosenblum for his constructive suggestions, and to
The domain of attitudes of former mental patients toward work was conceptualized as including motivation and the value of work, the opinion climate of the social context, evaluation of self and relationships with others. Based on this conceptualization, a 103 item questionnaire consisting of 73 Likert-type and 30 true-false items was devised. An orthogonal factor analysis of the responses of 337 Ss is described. Factors were identified as Alienation from a Rejecting Environment, Stressful Existence, Authoritarian Work Ideology, Devaluation of Work, Vocational Futility, Interpersonal Inadequacy and Anticipation of Rejection. 5 of the 7 factors were scored and the reliabilities of the resulting factor scores determined. Significant relationships between 2 factor-scored variables and a dichotomous work criterion were found.
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