ISSUES IN THE COMPARISON OF TECHNIQUES FOR ELICITING SOURCE MATERIAL IN COMPUTERIZED CONTENT-ANALYSIS

Zeldow and McAdams (1993) recently presented artifactual explanations for our data showing dissimilarity between the content of speech elici ted by the Thematic Apperception Test (Murray, 1943) and free speech t asks (Schnurr, Rosenberg, & Oxman, 1992). In particular, they alleged that our findings resulted from a lack of psychological meaning in our content categories and in the free speech task. We cite empirical and theoretical support to refute this allegation and provide additional analyses of our data that are consistent with our earlier suggestion t hat text samples elicited under different conditions may not be interc hangeable.