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first...)
Introduction:
The sentence stems in your homework assignment were taken
from the W.U. Sentence Completion Test developed by Jane Loevinger. Her
sentence completion test is another example of the type of semi-structured
yet semi-projective test ego psychologists liked to use to assess how people
consciously and actively make sense of their lives. Notice how it is similar
to Adler asking you to complete the sentence: "My earliest memory is…" An
important difference between Adler and Loevinger, however, was that
Loevinger was an expert on test development, and developed a very detailed
and complex and reliable method for coding the sentence completions she
elicited. Over 30 years of research suggest that her method is indeed
reliable, and has some validity as well. But validity as a measure of what?
What Loevinger wanted to assess was nothing less than the totality of how your
ego makes sense of your experiences. In particular, she suggested that there
was a set of distinct, ordered stages in the development of the ego.
However, whereas Freud suggested that the stages of psychosexual development
occurred at approximately the same ages for everyone and were completed by
adolescence, Loevinger suggested that different people completed the stages
of ego development at different ages, and few people would ever complete all
of the stages. In this lesson we will examine Loevinger's theory of ego
development and method of assessing ego development in detail.
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