Roberts-2

The respondent is shown each test card in turn, and is asked to create a complete story based on what he or she perceives in the picture. As the respondent narrates, the administrator writes a verbatim transcript. The words and phrases used by the respondent are then decoded and scored using the Record Form. The assessment consists of a set of 16 picture cards and a corresponding Record Form. It usually takes between 30 and 40 minutes to administer.

The Roberts-2 Manual offers extensive examples of children’s stories and scoring instructions. It provides evidence of the test’s validity, based on comparisons between the standardization sample and a clinically referred sample of 467 children and adolescents. This evidence supports use of the Roberts-2 in clinical assessment of children experiencing adjustment problems and in research on the development of social understanding.

The Roberts-2 was developed using a normative sample of 1,000 children and adolescents, ranging from 6 to 18 years of age. The new norms are representative in terms of geographic region (all four U.S. Census regions covered), gender, ethnicity, and parental education. Data were collected for two separate samples: a standardization sample (N=1,060) that includes nonreferred children and adolescents from different organizations, and a referred clinical sample (N=467) that consists of data from cooperating clinics and special education facilities.