2002), and strength of romantic relationships (Bengston & Grotevant, 1999).
Rogers also saw that the procedure fit nicely with the humanistic model ofpersonality and quickly adopted it.
The California Q-Sort (Block, 1978, 2008) is a good example of a Q-Sort
procedure used by many humanistic therapists. The materials for this test arenot very elaborate. They consist of a deck of 100 cards. A self-descriptive
phrase is printed on each card, such as “is a talkative individual, ”“seeks re-
assurance from others,” or“has high aspiration level for self.”
If you were a client about to begin a series of sessions with a Rogerian ther-
apist, you might be instructed to read the cards and sort them into categories.
On the first sort, you would be asked to place the cards into nine categories ac-cording to how much you believe the description on the card applies to you.
The nine categories represent points on a normal distribution (Figure 11.2),
with the categories on the extreme ends representing characteristics most de-scriptive of you (Category 9) and least descriptive of you (Category 1).
Extremely
UncharacteristicQuite
UncharacteristicFairly
UncharacteristicSomewhat
UncharacteristicRelativelyNeutral Somewhat
CharacteristicFairly
CharacteristicQuite
CharacteristicExtremely
Characteristic(5) (8) (12) (16) (18) (16) (12) (8) (5)
FIGURE 11.2 Distribution of Cards on Block ’s Q-Sort298 CHAPTER 11 The Humanistic Approach