Some Aspects of Adolescence in Rakau: A Thematic Apperception Test Study

Abstract

The aims of this study (which involves the analysis of 40 Thematic Apperception Test protocols) can be most fully understood in the context of the Rakau research as a whole. The Rakau research has been described as... "the studying of a Maori community in the North Island of New Zealand in order to annotate some of the changes introduced into this community by an increasing and irreversible commitment to technological change. In order to carry out this programme of research it has been necessary to obtain as detailed a knowledge as possible of the Maori social and personality systems subjected to the impact of a new economic system based upon intensive lumbering and processing of this raw material into paper products." It is the writer's hope that this thesis will make some contribution towards the understanding of such "social and personality systems". More specifically this study has two major aims. 1. It is an attempt to examine, within a knowledge of the cultural context, the temporally correlative processes of individuation and socialisation amongst the Maori youth of Rakau. Our material has been analysed with an emphasis on the characteristic ways in which the young people in the area organise their experience within a culturally derived context and regulate their behaviour in terms of the cognitive and affective significance which they attribute to features of their environment. 2. It also is an attempt to evaluate, independently of their originator, a series of hypotheses concerning the basic personality characteristics of the people under study. These hypotheses are essentially a group of summarised statements derived from the descriptive material of a trained observer. Thus an attempt will be made to produce results which, when stated in the context of a common conceptual framework, are capable of evaluating the picture of basic personality already derived from both Rorschach records and qualitative cultural analysis.