Self-Conceptions in a General Population.

One of the most promising efforts to operationalize the concept of the "self" has been that of the late Professor Manford H. Kuhn and his students. This approach has employed the "Twenty-Statements Test," or TST, an open-ended instrument which is designed to elicit the respondent's "spontaneous" self-definitions in their order of salience. Since its first publication in 1954, the TST has been used in a variety of studies? However, previous studies of the "self" have been conducted on restricted population samples, and little is known about the self-definitions held by a general population. The present paper describes the TST responses of a representative sample of the general adult population of Iowa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]