Intellectual evaluations of adolescents via human figure drawings: an empirical comparison of two methods.

The human figure drawings of 200 adolescent boys were collected at a residential treatment center in a midsized, midwestern city. The drawings were scored for cognitive ability according to the systems of Buck (1966) and Goodenough and Harris (1963). Both scoring systems showed acceptable interrater reliability and both were positively and significantly related to IQ scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. Buck's system, however, had less of a tendency to underestimate IQ scores. Buck's system may therefore hold greater promise for the intellectual assessment of adolescents with human figure drawings.

Intellectual evaluations of children using human figure drawings: an empirical investigation of two methods.

This study evaluated the scoring systems of Goodenough and Harris (1963) and Koppitz (1968) for using human figure drawings to assess the intellectual abilities of children. Drawing scores of 125 children, aged 5 to 15, were compared to their performance on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), while the drawing scores of a separate group of 74 children, aged 5 to 12, were compared to their performance on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, Form L-M. While Both drawing systems correlated significantly with the WISC-R as well as the Stanford-Binet, the longer and more detailed Goodenough-Harris had a significantly higher correlation with Performance IQ on the WISC-R than did the Koppitz. Neither drawing system had a pattern of significantly different validity coefficients for children of varying ages or IQ levels.

Cognitive evaluations of young adults by means of human figure drawings: an empirical investigation of two methods.

This study evaluated Buck's (1948) House-Tree-Person and Goodenough and Harris's (1963) Draw-A-Person scoring systems for assessing the cognitive abilities of young adults. IQ scores based on these scoring systems and, in the case of the H-T-P, using only the first person drawn, were correlated with WAIS-R Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs. Both figure scoring systems correlated significantly with WAIS-R Performance and Full Scale IQs, but were underestimates of WAIS-R IQs. H-T-P scoring of the house, tree, and second person drawn then was added to the scoring of the first person drawn to see whether such additions would enhance validity. They did not. Results are discussed in terms of characteristics of the scoring systems' standardization samples and limitations of these systems.