Loevinger's Stages of Ego Development - Criticism

Criticism

Some have maintained that 'in general, Loevinger's model suffers from a lack of clinical grounding', and that arguably 'like Kohlberg's theory...it confuses content and structure'. Based as her research was on the assessment of verbalised material, because 'the measure focuses so heavily on conscious verbal responses, it does not discriminate intelligent, liberal people with severe ego defects from those who actually are quite integrated'.

Nevertheless the wide extent of her research must give a certain weight to her findings. 'Loevinger's (1976) model of development is derived entirely from empirical research using her sentence completion test...The manuals contain hundreds of actual completions, organized by exemplary categories'.

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