Development of a Thematic Apperception Test ({temas}) for urban Hispanic children.

Administered a thematic apperception technique (TEMAS) composed of chromatic stimuli picturing Hispanic characters in urban settings to 73 kindergartners to 3rd graders who were nonclinical and from Puerto Rican backgrounds and used data on 210 (kindergartners to 6th graders) clinical Puerto Rican Ss obtained earlier by the present 2nd author (1979) to investigate the psychometric properties of the instrument. Results show internal consistency and interrater reliability in scoring TEMAS protocols. TEMAS indices significantly discriminated between the public school and clinical samples. In the clinical samples, estimates of concurrent validity ranged from .32 to .51 with measures of ego development, trait anxiety, and adaptive behavior. Pretherapy TEMAS profiles predicted 6–22% of the variance in posttherapy treatment outcomes. Findings provide preliminary support for the clinical utility of the TEMAS for Hispanic children, who typically are inarticulate in response to traditional projective tests. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)