A picture is worth less than a thousand words: Response to reviewers.

Abstract

The comments in response to our article on human figure drawings (HFDs) (Motta, Little, & Tobin, this issue) ranged from balanced and supportive to biased and attacking. As we had expected, the self-aggrandizing critiques of Naglieri, Bardos, and to a lesser extent, Holtzman, centered more around issues of pet articles that were not included in our paper rather than a substantive presentation of data in support of HFDs. Their thinly veiled tactic of impugning our scholarliness was used to hide one glaringly obvious point, that is, there is little to no compelling data to support the use of HFDs in psychological assessment. The continued use of these invalid assessment devices may represent a violation of the APA Code of Ethics, as shown below.Naglieri and Bardos go on to criticize the editorial policy of this journal even though the editor showed unquestioned fairness in soliciting responses (which were not themselves reviewed) from those who, a priori, were expected to be critical of what we wrote. In our opinion, the editor shows characteristics which are completely lacking in Naglieri et al.'s writing, namely objectivity and balance.Naglieri, Bardos, and Holtzman's critiques show little regard for, or understanding of the value of science. They substitute ad hominem attacks for data and in doing so, have succeeded in hoisting themselves on their own petards of a lack of scholarliness. In fact, one study which they all seem to have conveniently overlooked was authored by one of the contributors to this series (cited in Knoff, this issue). After reviewing over 100 studies on drawings, Knoff found little empirical support for their continued use. In another unscholarly "oversight," Naglieri crows about a study showing a .47 correlation between the Draw-A-Person Quantitative Scoring System

Drawing a Close to the Use of Human Figure Drawings as a Projective Measure of Intelligence

“…These efforts, however, have consistently failed to produce a psychometrically sound assessment tool for children's intellectual functioning, with the DAP:IQ being no exception. Unfortunately, while children's HFDs are also commonly used to assess their personality [65], [66], [67], [68], [69], emotional well-being [70], [71], [72], and sexual abuse status [73], [74], [75], empirical evidence also stands against the utility of projective drawing tests in these domains. Given the dearth of empirical evidence supporting the use of HFDs as a projective measure, we believe it is time that practitioners draw an end to their use of children's HFD tests as a surrogate measure of children's intelligence.…”

What Does the DAP:IQ Measure?: Drawing Comparisons between Drawing Performance and Developmental Assessments

“…These criticisms sparked a raging debate between researchers defending human figure drawing tasks as measures of IQ [4,13,27] and researchers opposing their use [12,15,16,24].…”

Um estudo sobre a dimensionalidade do teste do Desenho da Figura Humana

“…Em acréscimo, alguns pesquisadores (Motta, Little & Tobin, 1993;Gresham, 1993, por exemplo) discutiram que apesar da validez de seu uso, os resultados mais consistentes obtidos por outras medidas tornaram seu uso supérfluo. Em resumo, as queixas sobre a falta de evidências validade do DFH para avaliações psicológicas são encontradas freqüentemente, mas também foi afirmada muitas vezes.…”