An Investigation of the Validity of the H-t-p as an Intelligence Test for Children

The H-T-P standardization sample as described in the manual ̂ *̂ included 140 subjects age 16 and above. Since the norms for evaluation of the House-Tree-Person drawings in terms of IQ's were derived from such populations, it may be assumed that this type of intellectual evaluation was prepared primarily for adults. However, soon after the publication of the H-T-P manual various workers in the field began to show considerable interest for application of this technique to children. Buck^^^ advanced some suggestions for usage of the H-T-P with children in the Proceedings of Richmond Workshop. Jolleŝ *> and Jolles and Beck^̂ ""^ provide some empirical data concerning specific aspects of children's drawings such as sexual identification and vertical and horizontal placement of the drawings. Bieliauskas^^^ proposed the steps for standardization of the H-T-P on children. The first steps in this direction dealing with establishing of the developmental pattems in the H-T-P drawings of children have been completed in the subsequent years by Duffy '̂̂ Woods and Repucci^^'\ Markham("\ and Bieliauskas and Pennington^'\ At the present time, a review of the literature did not reveal the existence of an H-T-P scoring system for evaluation of children's drawings. Siegel's^"^ preliminary attempt to establish the validity of the qualitative aspects of the H-T-P with children showed some promise, but it never was followed. There was no attempt found to examine empirically the feasibility of using the present H-T-P scoring system with children. However, observations of clinicians who are using the H-T-P with children suggest that some of them apply the present H-T-P scoring system to the scoring of children's drawings regardless of the limitations of the normative data. Therefore it appears to these writers that at least a pilot type of examination of the validity of the present H-T-P scoring system for quantitative evaluation of children's drawings is needed as a necessary step in H-T-P standardization.