Types of Construct and the Academic Project

Preemptive:
Constellatory-Stereotyped:
Propositional:

Types of Constructs 

• Preemptive Construct – freezes its elements for membership exclusively in its own realm – “this is what it is…it cannot be anything else”
• Constellatory Construct – permits its elements to belong to other realms concurrently, but fixes their realm membership – “They can be anything else at the same time, but they are always…
• Propositional Construct – leaves its elements open to alternative constructions – very flexible

• All types are useful, in their place ( re: ontology?)

Kelly G

Kelly's Methodological Concerns

Kelly developed the Repertory Grid interview as a means of getting people to show him their construct systems. He had some very important methodological concerns about the standard of interviewing, especially in clinical psychology. His major concerns were:

• Interviewer Bias. He had seen that the interviewer often contributes more to the diagnosis than the interviewee (remember that he was a clinician and these were the days when Freudians and Jungians and Behaviourists were quarrelling vigorously). I used to work for a major consultancy firm where the client’s problem depended very much on who answered the phone – though they weren’t allowed to have no problems at all.
• Specificity in measuring, and where possible predicting, the characteristics of individual people and small groups. Psychology was a relatively new discipline, and many psychologists were seeking ‘laws’ of human behaviour. So there was the ‘rats, cats, and stats’ approach to studying behaviour, and large-scale studies showing the correlations between different aspects of personality and behaviour; but this was no good to Kelly, or to any other clinician, because they see people one at a time or in small groups.
• Over-dependence on the expert. Clinical psychology at the time could be satirised as the patient lying on the couch while the ‘expert’ told him what was wrong with him. Kelly took the view that most people can take responsibility for understanding and, where necessary, adapting their behaviour; and that the role of the therapist would be more useful as a ‘skilled mirror.’