tomed to seeing from self-reports, but that is to be expected. Relative to
the limited reliability of projective tests, the modest long-term retestcorrelations from TAT studies can be seen as further evidence of stabil -
ity .
Age and the Spontaneous Self-Concept
We have argued that unstructured methods that require little inference
on the part of the researcher and thus approximate self-reports havegenerally been shown to be more valid than other projective methods.Measures of the spontaneous self-concept may combine the best of bothworlds. In these techniques, individuals are simply asked to describethemselves, either in a few paragraphs or as a series of responses to thequestion, “Who am I?” (Kuhn & McPartland, 1954). These are cer -
tainly self-reports, but they are free of the usual constraints of question-
naires that ask a series of specific questions.
We studied the spontaneous self-concept of men and women in the
BLSA (McCrae & Costa, 1988a). Subjects provided 20 different re-sponses to the question, “Who am I?”; two raters categorized their re-sponses. Recall that the self-concept is composed of many kinds of ele-ments, of which personality dispositions are only one. Most peopledescribed themselves in terms of social roles (“a loving mother,” “a re-tired teacher”), physical characteristics such as health or attractiveness,and activities and attitudes (“I enjoy boating and camping”). Aboutone-quarter of the responses specified personality traits (“I am hard-working and productive”). In addition to categorizing each separate re -
sponse, our raters gave overall impressions of the individual’s standing
on each of the five personality factors and on the general level of self-esteem.
There were several findings of note from this study . First, the im -
pressions of personality that raters drew from the patterns of responses
were fairly accurate: The two raters generally agreed with each other,and in most cases their combined ratings were significantly correlatedwith both self-reports and peer ratings on the NEO-PI. We apparentlyget much the same information when we ask specific questions of sub -
jects or when we ask them for a general description of themselves and
then evaluate the specific responses they make in terms of our basic di -
mensions. Second, there was little evidence that personality expressed
in the spontaneous self-concept was influenced much by age. OlderEgo Psychologies and Projective Methods 161