Computer Analysis of Sentence Completions

Abstract

Sentence completions of two groups of high school students distinguished by a sociometric instrument as Liked or Disliked were submitted to the General Inquirer computer system for retrieval and content analysis of verbal text.

The General Inquirer analyzed the sentence completions by tagging the text with categories based on psychosociological theories. Frequency counts for each category indicate systematic differences in the strength and direction of the verbal text of Liked and Disliked students.

Inferences drawn about the personalities of Liked and Disliked students on the basis of the psychosociological theories in the dictionary seem reasonable in terms of the sociometric ratings.

The General Inquirer may have good potential as an objective method of scoring sentence completions particularly with an expanded text and a dictionary containing theories directly pertinent to the theory underlying a set of sentence completions. Further research on sentence completions using the General Inquirer seems warranted.