The Problem of Dream Content Analysis Validity as Shown by a Bizarreness Scale

Content analysis is one of the basic methods utilized in psychological dream research (1-3). The following example illustrates this approach. A psychotherapist speculates that depressive patients dream about rejection more often than comparable healthy controls. A research colleague elicits 100 dream reports of healthy subjects and 100 dream reports of patients with depression and constructs a scale with explicit coding rules that measures rejection within the dream, i.e., the occurrence of at least one situation in which the dreamer is rejected by other dream characters is coded as 1 (otherwise 0). It is of major importance that the scale is developed without knowing the dream material to be analyzed. In the next step, the dream reports are sorted randomly and an external judge rates each dream whether rejection as defined by the content analytic scale is present or not. After the judging procedure, the dreams are assigned to the two groups that are compared statistically in order to test whether depressed patients have reported rejection dreams more often according to their reports. The advantages of this approach are clearly visible: content differences are reflected quantitatively and are thus accessible for statistical testing. In addition, an external judge using a scale with explicit coding rules minimizes the subjectivity of the experimenter and the study is replicable, e.g., when analyzing The Problem of Dream Content Analysis Validity as Shown by a Bizarreness Scale