Research Methods: Self-Characterisation, Kelly

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your query – always good to hear from students using a constructivist approach to their studies. 

My first impression is to agree that rep grid as a tool may not be ideal for your purposes. As you say, the experience of creativity is not easily captured in systematic binary form. Although rep grid has become the main research tool in PCP, I don’t believe that was ever intended. PCP is an essentially creative theory – it is about invention and re-invention, and constructivist research should be a creative act.

Perhaps creative flow lends itself more to an ‘unveiling’ as mentioned in your quote on poiesis? As you have been exploring your own creative practice experientially, perhaps this will be the way to work with others? The knack will be to underpin this with some methodological rigour.

I wonder if you might be able to develop methods based on Kelly’s self-characterisation techniques? This asks a person to write about themselves, intimately and sympathetically, in the third person. People could be invited to write about their creative self and its contrast.   Kelly offers a variety of clues for analysing and exporing these characterisations. These have been developed and elaborated by various practitioners, and they also lend themselves to thematic analysis.

This kind of exercise can easily be converted into art work – for example, drawing the creative self and the context in which it flourishes, and then drawing the contrast. Or expressing this contrast in a variety of other forms. These ‘products’ provide rich packets of data for further detailed exploration and for collaborative hypothesising about common themes.

We are still working with dichotomies here but in looser form, the method itself is more about ‘bringing into the light’ and less about pinning down. That comes later as we try to extract some propositional conclusions from the data.

Fay Fransella descibes it this way:

 Its analysis does not rest on the derivation of quotients for pleasure-pain statements, or on counts of such things as negative and positive statements. Instead, as Kelly puts it, one "listens to nature babbling to herself" and seeks to gain some insights into another's personal construct system.

I’ve attached a paper I wrote about learning to sing which was approached in this way. People were asked to construe themselves as non-singers and as singers. The outcome of the study was a range of proposals about how we might create a facilitative environment for non-singers learning to sing. It may be of interest to you.

Self-characterisation features in kelly’s 2-volume work on PCP (1955) and I’ve attached a handout used on PCPA introductory courses.

The conversion into images/metaphor and back out from them has some similarities to the soft systems work, although I have a sense that that methodology lends itself best to working on the process of change. Your work sounds more exploratory, less directional?

I don’t know the work you mention on management constellations – thanks for the article, I will enjoy reading it,

All good wishes

Mary

mary frances

personal and organisational development

mary.frances@virgin.net