Let’s suppose the description on the first card is “is a talkative individual. ”
If this phrase describes you very well, you would place the card in Category 9
or 8. If this phrase describes you only slightly, you might place it in Category 6.
If you think you are a very quiet person, you might put the card in Cate-
gory 1 or 2. There is a limit to how many cards can be placed in each cat-
egory, so indecisive test takers are forced to select cards that are most
descriptive of them. In this manner, you provide the therapist and yourself
with a profile of your self-concept.
After recording which cards went into which categories, you would be
asked to shuffle the deck and take the test again. However, this time youwould distribute the cards according to your “ideal”self. If “is a talkative in-
dividual ”does not describe you very well, but you want to become more
talkative, you would move this card to a higher category than you used dur-ing the first sort. When you have laid out descriptions of your “real”and
“ideal”selves, you and the therapist can compare the two profiles.
The Q-Sort technique fits very nicely with Rogers ’theory for several rea-
sons. Consistent with Rogers’ assumption that clients know themselves best,
clients are allowed to describe themselves however they please. Of course, a
therapist will not always agree with a client ’s placement of the cards. A client
might describe herself as socially aware, polite, and sensitive to the needs of
others when a perceptive therapist sees right away that her crude insensitivity
may be part of her problem. The task for the therapist in this case is to help
the client come to see herself as she really is.
By assigning each card a number from 1 to 9 according to its category, we
can compute a correlation coefficient between a client ’s real self and his or her
ideal self. For a psychologically healthy person, the two should be very similar.
If category values are identical for both profiles, a perfect 1.0 correlation
would be obtained, although it is difficult to imagine people being just like
their ideal selves in every way. The further the correlation is from 1.0, the lessaccepting people are of themselves and the less fully functioning. Clients whose
real and ideal selves are completely unrelated would have a zero correlation.
Clients ’profiles can also be negatively correlated if their real and ideal selves
are at opposite sides on many of the descriptions. Consistent with Rogers’ de-
scriptions, researchers find that a high correlation between a person’ s real and
ideal self is related to positive well-being (Gough, Fioravanti, & Lazzari, 1983;Gough, Lazzari, & Fioravanti, 1978).
Other studies find that real –ideal self correlations increase as clients move
through client-centered psychotherapy (Butler, 1968). To illustrate how theQ-Sort can be used to track therapeutic progress, let ’s look at one of Rogers’
clients (Rogers, 1961). This 40-year-old woman came to Rogers with pro-blems that included an unhappy marriage and guilt about her daughter ’s psy-
chological problems. The woman attended 40 therapy sessions over the
course of 5 1/2 months and returned a few months later for some additional
sessions. She completed the real and ideal self Q-Sorts at the beginning and atvarious stages during her treatment. She also completed the Q-Sort at two
follow-up sessions, 7 and 12 months after her therapy. The correlations
among the various Q-Sorts are presented in Figure 11.3.Assessment: The Q-Sort Technique 299