A Cognitive perspective on projective tests
 

Good concept (anybody need a dissertation topic?). I don't remember seeing anything written about this but I've discussed it in workshops a few times. It makes sense theoretically and I've found it useful clinically a few times.

One major problem with projectives is the reliability and validity (or lack thereof) of interpretive systems. For this approach to projectives to work well, someone would need to come up with a systematic approach to scoring and interpreting the client's responses so that different clinicians show an adequate level if interrater reliability and then would need to demonstrate an adequate level of validity. I bet it can be done, but it would not be a small project.

If this can be done, another important question will be whether time spent administering and interpreting the TAT is productive enough to justify spending session time in that way. My bet is that there are more efficient ways to get the same information. It probably will turn out that it is more productive to spend session time pin-pointing automatic thoughts that occur in problem situations rather than spending the time interpreting responses to the TAT.

However, it is possible that this TAT methodology could be quite useful in research. CT researchers really need valid ways to assess dysfunctional beliefs, schemas, interpersonal strategies, etc. without just relying on self-report. Structured methods for interpreting responses to TAT-like cards, sentence completion tests, etc. would have a lot of potential.

Re: A Cognitive perspective on projective tests
 

This possibility never occured to me. I wonder how one could possibly check the validity of this kind of assessment without looking for correlations with self-reports. It would be a huge project. Far too big for a Master's thesis, methinks. (Sigh). I have three or four ideas like this a week, and I've already forgotten most of them. Thanks for the feedback.

Validating measures of schemas, etc.
 

Off the top of my head, it seems that one of the things to do is to go ahead and look at correlations with self-report measures. However, you'd also want to look at other ways of assessing the variables you're assessing through scoring responses to projectives. I think that cognitive psychologists (i.e. academic psychologists who research cognitive processes) have some laboratory procedures for assessing schemas and other cognitive variables. I seem to remember studies using the Stroop Test, reaction times, etc. but I don't remember the details at the moment. If I remember right Rich McNally has published some studies of objective measures of cognitive variables.

It wouldn't be an easy project but if your goal is to go into academia it might well be a topic where you can do some innovative and publishable research by using a masters thesis to set the stage for a dissertation on the same topic. If your goal is primarily to go into clinical practice, it may be a bigger project than you'd want to take on.