IF-THEN METHOD - international version - [page 7]
NORMAL AND SUSPECTED MOTIVE COMPONENTS
As mentioned above, we adopted one hypothesis so that any change is not contained in the subject's
response tendency for each four-task set. The social motive component detected under such a so-
called normal condition is called the "normal social motive component". However, some consideration
should be paid to the possibility that real subjects often respond to the tasks in a variety of ways
in order to maintain the possibility of analyzing the real responses in a clear form. When some am-
bigious array is realized in the subject's response series, the following conventional technique may
be adopted in this test. In order to explain this problem, let us show an example. Now, suppose that
a response array of "I, II, I, II" for the same four tasks used in the above example was realized. This
response array is not included in the nine arrays corresponding to the nine normal motive components
described in the upper portion of Figure 5. In such case, a technique called the "mutual exchange" be-
tween the two alternatives, I and II, in the response series is conventionally adopted. The exchanges
( I -> II or II -> I ) are performed four times because the array consists of four responses. After each
exchange, each new array of responses is analyzed. As a result, two or three components would be de-
tected for four exchanges. These components are called the "suspected motive components". The number
of suspected components is always two or three. In the case where some "suspected motive components"
are gained, we give some light weights to each of the "suspected components". When the number of
the suspected components is two, we give a weight of one-half for each of these two components. When
the number is three, the weight is a third. This conventional procedure is based upon the hypothesis
that the probabilities with which these two or three components appear for this array would be 1/2 or
1/3, respectively.
RATIOS OF MOTIVE COMPONENTS
As mentioned before, we can get 128 social motive components for each series of the pro series and
the post series. Even when some ambiguous part is involved in the subject's response series, the total
number of the components is always 128 because the suspected component is proportionally assigned to
some part of the distribution following some weight. This procedure means that the social motive com-
ponent or components would be always detected from each response array in a form of one unit as a to-
tal, even if the array consists of only random responses. Thus we can always get a total of 100 % by
summing the percentages of the social motive component for each series. Usually, the averages of the
ratios of appearance between the pro series and the post series is used.
An example of the distribution of the social motive components for a subject is shown in Figure 6.
In this case, "individualism" (A+) has about 13%, "masochism" (A-) has 6%, "altruism" (B+) has about
12%, and so on. In fact, this response series in this example was randomly constructed. The results
of a typical subject's responses gained in many experiments frequently shows 100 % for only one specif-
ic social motive for each subject. Anyway, we can detect a real subject's social motives or response
tendency in a form of a set of nine values of percentages corresponding to each of the nine normative
social motives.
Fig.6