Technical Foundations for Measuring Ego Development: The Washington University Sentence Completion Test by Le Xuan Hy

Author:Le Xuan Hy [Hy, Le Xuan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Behavioral Sciences
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 1998-01-31T18:30:00+00:00

Subsequent studies, some of them conducted by sociologists like Lasker, have employed the WUSCT in non-Western societies. They offer insights into the question he asked.

STUDIES OF EGO DEVELOPMENT IN NON-WESTERN SOCIETIES

Ego Development and the Japanese Character. The first researcher to use the WUSCT in Japan was Kusatsu (1977, 1978). He provided extensive descriptions of variation in ego development scores as they related to cultural and corporate subcultural differences.

Kusatsu’s study employed direct measures of personality, and interpersonal characteristics in a sample stratified by occupation. He demonstrated considerable diversity among individuals, findings that contradicted previous oversimplifications of Japanese “cultural identity.” His sample included 295 men in Matsumoto, a city of 170,000 on Honshu mainland. They were systematically drawn from jobs at 19 professional levels. Data collection included an adapted, 12-item version of the WUSCT, measures of attitudes, values, interpersonal orientation, political orientation, Inkeles’ conception of modernity, and life satisfaction. WUSCT responses were first rated with Loevinger et al.’s (1970) English manual. Internal consistency was similar to that reported for U.S. samples.

After a review of the correspondence of individual item ratings as compared to TPRs, adjustments were made to the coding system for about 15% to 20% of the responses. Revisions of scoring were intended to maintain the intent of the coding system, especially as a method of documenting conformity and the emergence from it. For example,

One noticeable example of difference between Japanese and American responses is found for the stub of the sentence completions: “The thing I like about myself is….” Such responses as “nothing at all” or “something in myself with which I am dissatisfied” were rated at the transitional stage (I 3/4) between Conformity and Conscientious stages, through some of them are rated at the Impulsive stage (I 2) in Loevinger’s manual. This is because of the Japanese norm of humiliation of the individual ego. (Kusatsu, 1977, p. 66)

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