Developing a scale to measure total impression of synthetic house-tree-person drawings

We developed a scoring scale for the method of total impression of projective drawing. We focused especially on the Synthetic House-Tree-Person (S-HTP) projective drawing technique. First, we asked 7 clinical psychology graduate students to write down key words that they associated with total impressions of S-HTP drawings. Second, we selected 35 items based on these words and developed the Scale for Total Impression of Drawings (STID). Using the STID, 6 clinical psychologists rated 30 S-HTP pictures drawn by Japanese junior high school students. Finally, we selected 12 descriptive words as items and results of confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the STID was divided into 4 subscales we labeled as vitality, reality, themes, and gentleness. These converged with 2 higher factors of emotional stability and context consistency. Fit indexes of the model were sufficient.