Personal Construct Methodology

Peter Caputi, Linda L. Viney, Beverly M. Walker, Nadia Crittenden, Peter Caputi, Linda L. Viney, Beverly M. Walker, Nadia Crittenden

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781119954163, 9780470770870
• eBook ISBN: 9781119953326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Written by an international team of experts, this collection provides a comprehensive account of established and emerging methods of collecting and analysing data within the framework of personal construct theory.

• Covers methods such as content analysis scales, repertory grid methodology, narrative assessments and drawings, the laddering and ABC techniques, and discusses how and why they are used
• Explores both qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as methods used in clinical and counselling settings
• Includes 13 contributions from leading international scholars

Part I

Setting the Scene

Chapter 1

Assessment of Personal Constructs: Features and Functions of Constructivist Techniques

Heather Gaines Hardison and Robert A. Neimeyer

The psychology of personal constructs is not so much a theory about man as it is a theory of man . . . It is part of a psychologist's protracted effort to catch the sense of man going about his business of being human, and what on earth it means to be a person . . . Our theme is the personal adventure of the men we are and live with – the efforts, the enterprises, the ontology of individuals so convinced there is something out there, really and truly, that they will not relent, no matter what befalls them, until they have seized it in their own hands.

(Kelly, 1963, p. 183)

These thoughts, first written nearly 60 years ago by George Kelly, have since led to various attempts by clinicians, including Kelly himself, to “catch the sense of man” through distinctive assessment tools for use in psychotherapy settings. This chapter will review several of these personal construct assessments and how they have evolved over the past five decades, with special emphasis on their distinctive advantages and limitations as assessment methods. We will begin with an overview of the fundamental principles of Kelly's theory of personal constructs to provide an explanation of the theoretical framework within which these assessments were created.

Personal Construct Systems: An Overview

The guiding assumption of George Kelly's (1955) personal construct theory (PCT) is that humans literally construct the meaning of their own lives, by devising, testing, and continuously revising personal theories that help us make sense of the world around us and anticipate our future experiences. These personal theories, called construct systems, are comprised of an indefinite number of personal constructs that help differentiate, integrate, and predict life events. Personal constructs may be highly idiosyncratic or widely shared, and may vary in terms of how central or important they are in construing one's life (Winter, 1992).

According to Kelly's (1955) view of constructive alternativism, there are countless possible constructions of reality. In other words, events are subject to as many alternative ways of construing them as we ourselves can invent. Thus, personal construct theory describes how each of us uniquely construes or interprets our own world. Constructs, and their interrelationships within a hierarchically organized system, form the basis for hypotheses that guide an individual's choices and actions (Winter, 1992).

Kelly (1955) defined a construct as a particular way individuals have of viewing, giving meaning to, or construing the individuals and events in their life and the world around them. According to personal construct theory, all constructs are “bipolar,” meaning some sort of contrast (e.g., intelligent/ignorant) is implied. The implied contrast gives constructs their uniqueness. Meanings of certain constructs may vary according to the element being construed, and implied constructs may vary across individuals. For example, the contrasting construct of the word “lenient” might be “harsh” to one person and for someone else it might mean “unbending or fixed,” which are rather different meanings. Therefore, even though individuals may draw upon common and publicly shared discriminations in constructing their conceptual templates, they typically develop construct systems that are in some degree idiosyncratic, giving their construct systems a richer personal significance than relying on simple dictionary antonyms.

Kelly (1955) proposed that each person constructs his or her own version of reality using a hierarchical system of personal constructs. “Not only are the constructs personal, but the hierarchical system into which they are arranged is personal too . . . When one construct subsumes another its ordinal relationship may be termed superordinal and the ordinal relationship of the other becomes subordinal” (Kelly, 1955, pp. 56–58). It is common for an individual to revise his/her construct system continuously as the universe constantly changes across time. Hence, constructions that might have seemed reasonable at some point in the past can be invalidated by current events. Kelly viewed individuals as personal scientists, classifying, categorizing, and theorizing about their world, anticipating on the basis of their own personal theories, and acting on the basis of their anticipation.

One of the most important aspects of personal construct theory is that individuals will differ from each other in their constructions of events. Kelly (1955) suggests that to obtain the best explanation of a person's organization of experience or behavior, one should find ways to inquire of the person who does the organizing because only he or she is expert on this unique process, which leads us to how constructivists actually inquire about an individual's construing process.

Constructivist Assessments

What makes an assessment constructivist? Neimeyer (1999) explained that these assessments tend to identify and explore personal narratives and constructions of the individual's experience, and evaluate his or her unique construct systems and hierarchies. This evaluation can be done by using, for example, ladders, repertory grids, implication grids, resistance to change grids, self-characterizations, and a variety of other measures that have a focus on the assessment of personal meanings (Neimeyer and Bridges, 2003). Thus, personal construct methods are designed to assess how the individual makes sense of the world, yielding a more holistic view of the respondent's meaning system than is afforded by most traditional psychological assessments. Personal construct psychology is essentially an idiographic approach, and its main strength comes from its ability to depict the content and structure of individual internal representations and ultimately to draw inferences about the general human process of meaning construction (Jankowicz, 1987). In applied settings, constructivist assessments essentially allow practitioners to better understand their clients and how they view the world around them.

Overall, personal construct assessments can contribute in clinical settings by guiding case conceptualization and the course of treatment, by revealing the core constructs that drive and contribute to clients' sense of identity and the reality of the world in which they live. In this respect they accord with a contemporary constructivist approach to assessment and therapy, which focuses on how clients order the world, develop a sense of self and relationship, and act in a way that is coherent with these constructions (Mahoney, 2003).

The aim of this chapter is to review five personal construct assessments that have been used to evaluate clients' construct systems. Particular attention will be given to evidence of their validity and reliability, the ways they can be used in various settings, and the unique advantages and disadvantages of each of these techniques. The assessments that were selected for this chapter include some of the more popular and frequently used methods as well as ones that are promising, but less frequently used. These include repertory grids, a structured interview to assess how people view individuals and events in their social world, (Fransella, Bell, and Bannister, 2004; Kelly, 1955); implication grids, used to assess the relationship between constructs (Hinkle, 1965; Winter, 1992); laddering interviews, a technique designed to elicit central core values (Hinkle, 1965; Neimeyer, Anderson, and Stockton, 2001); resistance to change grids, designed to identify core commitments or impasses (Hinkle, 1965; Landfield, Stefan, and Dempsey, 1990; Winter, 1992); and self-characterizations, narrative sketches written by the client to explore self-constructs (Kelly, 1955; Winter, 1992). Rather than performing an exhaustive review of all published studies regarding each method, our focus will be on a subset of publications bearing on the psychometric and practical advantages and limitations of each technique in assessing personal constructs in psychotherapy. We will conclude with a final section that formulates recommendations for future research on the various measures.

Repertory Grid

The repertory grid, which is a variation of Kelly's (1955) Role Construct Repertory Test, is essentially a structured interview procedure that allows the investigator to obtain a glimpse of the world through the “goggles” of the client's construct system. The goal of the repertory grid technique is to allow an investigation of a person's construing process of various aspects of his/her world and of the structural properties of the construct system. In its original form, the repertory grid was designed as a means of assessing the content and structure of an individual's repertory of role constructs, that system of interconnected meanings that define one's relationships to others (Kelly, 1955).

Essentially, the repertory grid consists of eliciting from the respondent a list of elements, or aspects of experience, and rating those elements on various constructs. The elements can include different people, facets of the self, a particular person or relationship at different points in time, situations, types of jobs, or any other items or individuals in his or her world (Fransella et al., 2004; Winter, 1992). Most commonly the respondent is asked to provide the names of individuals who fit certain role titles (e.g., your mother, your partner, a person of your own sex whom you would dislike having as a companion on a trip). The clinician will elicit a number of constructs by asking the client in what important way two of the elements are alike and thereby different from the third. The clinician then will attempt to elicit the contrast pole of this construct. For example, if prompted with the triad my spouse, my father, and myself, a person might respond, “my father and husband tend to be very conventional people, but I'm more rebellious.” This basic dimension, conventional vs. rebellious, would then be considered one of the significant themes or constructs that the person uses to organize, interpret, and approach the social world, and to define his or her role in it (Neimeyer, 2002). This procedure is then repeated with another triad of elements until a sufficient number of constructs has been elicited (Winter, 1992). The clinician can design the grid to meet the requirements of his/her particular situation and can choose the preferred grid size, commonly using in the neighborhood of 12 constructs by 12 elements. Next, the respondent is asked to rate or rank each of the elements on the resulting construct dimensions. All of these steps can be completed using computerized programs (e.g., WebGrid III, Omnigrid, Gridcor, etc.) that conduct a variety of analyses on the resulting matrix of ratings (Bringmann, 1992) and also provide clinicians with graphic representations of the client's construct system (Liseth et al., 1993). These can then help answer some of the following questions: what are the major dimensions or structural characteristics of the client's construct system?, how is the self construed?, how are other significant people construed?, and so on (Sewell et al., 1992; Winter, 1992). Fromm (2004), Jankowicz (2003) and Fransella and her colleagues (2004) offer comprehensive guides to repertory grid administration, analysis and interpretation, as well as examples of completed grids on a variety of topics.

Scores Yielded and Analysis

By presenting the respondent with a large number of elements (e.g., a disliked person, best friend, one's ideal self, etc.), the repertory grid (also referred to as repgrid) elicits a broad sampling of the personal constructs that represent the person's outlook on life. These constructs can then be interpreted clinically, used as the basis for further interviewing, or coded using any of a number of reliable systems of content analysis. It is often helpful to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the grid to discern larger patterns. This analysis might involve correlating and factor analyzing the matrix of ratings to determine which constructs “go together” for the respondent (for example, responsibility is associated with stability, whereas irresponsibility implies instability or chaos), or to learn the people with whom the client most and least identifies. The connections among constructs could reveal the reason that maladaptive patterns are held firmly in place for certain individuals. For example, a client may resist becoming more assertive instead of passive, because for this client assertiveness is associated with being rejected as opposed to being loved by others. Associations among elements (e.g., degree of correlation between actual self and ideal self) in a grid can also be clinically informative by providing the clinician with useful indicators of progress in psychotherapy (Neimeyer, 2002).

Results of repertory grids can be interpreted at two basic levels, focusing on the content and structure of the client's constructions. At the content level, grids can be analyzed in a qualitative fashion by considering the unique constructions of specific figur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Editors
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Setting the Scene
• Part II: Qualitative Approaches: Exploring Process
• Part III: Quantitative Approaches: Exploring Process
• Part IV: Methods in Counseling and Clinical Settings
• Index