The proposed research will apply state-of-the-art computer technology in digital sound, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and graphical user interfaces to enhance the administration and scoring of a projective test which assesses social development in children and adolescents. Phase 1 objectives include: 1) designing and developing a system to record and transcribe the projective interview; 2) developing a prototype artificial intelligence (AI) scoring tool to train coders and assist them in scoring the interviews; and 3) field testing the above systems on a sample of 20 children and adolescents aged eleven to fourteen years. These innovations will enable the Separation Anxiety Test to be administered more readily to larger samples at lower cost, making it more widely available to investigators. Successful completion of Phase 1 objectives will lead to a fully implemented system in Phase 2 which will be used to administer the projective measure to 250 children in a public school system. The proposed research will more firmly establish the utility of a projective method for assessing an important dimension of child socio-emotional development. The project will also demonstrate that technological innovations in the administration and scoring of projective tests could enable this class of psychological tools to become more widely employed in research and applied settings.
