4. The Draw a Person Test for Ghana

9
“ to meet the need for a modernized, recently normed, and objective scoring
system to be applied to human figure drawings produced by children
and adolescents” (1988,2).
The test has been used in various differing cultural settings such as Brazil
(Brito et al, 1998), India (Narchal & Juneija ,1986), Germany (Ziler
1949,2000), Greece ( Bardos & Petrogiannisc ,1989), West Africa (Ebigbo
& Izuora, 1981; D’Hondt, Cambier & Vandekrie, 1989) and even with
Alaskan Eskimos (Harris, 1963) just to give a few examples.
The Basic Concept of the Draw a Person Test
Harris (1963) assumes that changes in the child’s drawings of a man or a
woman represent the development of cognitive complexity or intellectual
maturity expressed by increasingly complex representations of the human
figure. He regards the child’s concept of a human figure as “an index or
sample of their concept generally” (Harris, 1963, 5).
According to Harris (1963, 5) intellectual maturity can be considered as
“the ability to form concepts of increasing abstract character” and he lists
the requirements of intellectual activity or concept formation as:
1. “ the ability to perceive, i.e., to discriminate likenesses and differences;
2. the ability to abstract, i.e., to classify objects according to such likenesses
and differences; and
3. the ability to generalize, i.e., to assign an object newly experienced
to a correct class, according to discriminated features, properties, or
attributes.” (Harris,1963,5)
It may be added that in using the drawing of a human figure as a method
of judging the extent to which the child has acquired the conception of an
observed object, the child must also dispose of the necessary visual-motor
coordination to put the object in his mind on paper.
We can therefore conclude that the drawing of a human figure by a child
gives a sample of the extent in which he has assimilated the concept of
the human figure. In the words of Harris (1963, 7): “this concept of a frequently
experienced object, such as a human being, becomes a useful index
to the growing complexity of his concepts generally”. Or as Cherney,
Seiwert, Dieckey & Flichtbeil (2006) state, numerous studies suggest that
children’s drawings illustrate an array of mental representations and cognitive
abilities which move from simple (i.e., stick figures) to complex representations
(such as individuals in clothing of different styles with detailed
facial features). As Cox (1993,1) in a comprehensive review notes
in Western cultures “children progress from a period of scribbling to the
production of tadpole forms and then on to conventional forms, at first
composed of segmented body parts, and then later of more contoured and
integrated sections”. Drawings at an early age consist of what seems to be
a head on two sticks and sometimes facial features. With advancing age
progressively more details such as a trunk are added and the proportion
of body parts become more realistic.
The following statements are excerpts from a review by Cox (1993) on the
evolution of children’s drawings of the human figure and are illustrated by
drawings of the Ghanaian children of our sample: