Train East African mental health providers in Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS) methodology with the goal of normative data collection across Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania.
So, for a little bit more background… The Rorschach, or the Inkblot Test, has become one of the most iconic tests in psychology. The general public sees the test almost as a Freudian mechanism of asking people their inner thoughts. DC comics brought even more attention to the inkblots when they created a moral vigilante character who goes by the name Rorschach. In the realm of psychology, the Rorschach is the most research psychometric tool. It came under heavy fire when it became realized in the 1970s that there were five different coding/analyzing systems in use – none of which aligned. Since then, there has been an aggregation of the systems by John Exner. When he passed, members of his Rorschach Research Council created what is known as the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS). R-PAS is a system of Rorschach assessment that is based (and changed) on empirical literature. In brief, the Rorschach is a projective psychological assessment that measures in moment personality – how someone perceives and engages with the world around them. The R-PAS developers’ goal is to create a transparent, empirically supported assessment measure that has international norms. Norms are essential in health data because they functionally dictate an individual’s degree of morbidity based on a comparative sample. In a field that has historically been tailored to the white and privileged, we are now seeing an honest attempt to make norms relevant to broader groups of people. What we do not know, or have any data on, is the Rorschach in Africa. There is something shameful in this, that the continent with the second largest population and one that accounts for approximately 16% of the world’s population. A South African team wrote a compendium of the psychological assessment use in South Africa, with a chapter dedicated to the Rorschach . Other than that, there are a mere handful of peer-reviewed articles that address the utility or use of the Rorschach for this continent, let alone the potential adaptation of norms in an attempt to make this assessment feasible and valid for the community.
