Children's Rorschachs: description and prediction.

The temporal consistency for 23 Rorschach variables was examined in an 8-year longitudinal study which involved testing 57 subjects at 24-month intervals, beginning when the subjects were age 8 and administering the fourth retest when they were age 16. The objective was to compare these data with norms for the various age groups and to study the features of development as manifest in the Rorschach. Only one variable, the X+%, appears relatively stable from age 8 to age 16, and the majority do not manifest consistency until the interval between ages 14 and 16. The data suggest that long term descriptive predictions of children can only be formulated with great caution except when conditions of severe pathology exist.