DRAWING CONCLUSIONS - A REEXAMINATION OF EMPIRICAL AND CONCEPTUAL BASES FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF CHILDREN FROM THEIR DRAWINGS

Purpose. Although consideration of children's art work (usually drawin gs) in clinical investigations of children referred to psychologists i s fairly common, there is little evidence for the reliability and vali dity of such assessments. We consider a variety of possible mechanisms which could operate to influence the characteristics of children's dr awings, and review the evidence that such mechanisms operate to allow meaningful psychological evaluations of children from their drawings. Methods. The problem for making a reliable interpretation of the signi ficance of a drawing is that a given feature could plausibly support s everal very different interpretations, depending which of many possibl e processes was active or dominant in the production of the drawing. E vidence from studies of clinical populations and experimental studies with non-selected samples are reviewed in the light of these possibili ties. Results. The review indicates that drawings are inaccurate and u nreliable as personality or state assessments but can be influenced by children's emotional attitudes towards the topics depicted. The form of that expression, however, may be personal and idiosyncratic. Analog ue studies of these effects undertaken with non-clinical samples under controlled conditions have produced mixed results. At best the report ed effects are small. Conclusions. Children's drawings on their own ar e too complexly determined and inherently ambiguous to be reliable sol e indicators of the emotional experiences of the children who drew the m. Further research is needed to establish the extent to which such dr awings can usefully facilitate assessment of children by other means o r provide useful support as one of several converging lines of evidenc e.