Intra-individual variability in sentence completion responses.

Abstract

Variability in responses to a sentence completion test over a 2 to 3 week interval, and the relationship between change in responses and relative response frequency in a group was studied. The major results were: (1) The content of the majority of responses was changed to some degree on retest. (2) Individual differences in number of responses changed on retest showed reasonable reliability. (3) Differences between sentence stems in the proportion of changed responses were consistent from group to group. (4) For each sentence stem, responses given by only one person change more frequently than those given by more than one person. (5) Positive correlations were obtained between the number of unique responses made by a subject and the number of responses he changed.