Cümle Tamamlama ve Sözcük Çağrışım Testleri

Sentence Completion and Word Association Tests

abstract

Projective tests come from psychology, and they try to bring out what people keep hidden. That means feelings and inner conflicts they live with but don't notice, which still affect the way they decide. This paper looks at two of these tests and how marketing picked them up.

It starts with how projective tests work in general. Most of them go back to Freud's psychoanalysis and assume we have both conscious and unconscious motives. So the questions are vague and open-ended on purpose, and the answers have to come fast, before the conscious mind steps in.

Also, the findings are usually read with content analysis, staying as far from prior assumptions as possible.

Then it goes into the two tests. The sentence completion test gives people the start of a sentence and asks them to finish it, and the paper covers where it's used and how the answers are analyzed.

The word association test is even simpler (you hear a word and say the first thing that comes to mind). For that one, the paper goes through its history and how it's applied.

The last part is about market research. After the 1950s, researchers like Ernest Dichter and James Vicary took these Freudian methods into marketing, at a time when the post-war American economy was pushing advertising hard.

And ad agencies and research companies, small and large, still use them. I wrote this literature review in Turkish during my Ph.D. studies.

read the pdf (Turkish)