Fay Fransella is Founder and Director of the Center for Personal Construct Psychology, Emeritus Reader in Clinical Psychology, University of London and Visiting Professor of Personal Construct Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. She has written 11 books, eight of them specifically relating to personal construct psychology and the use of repertory grids, and she has published over 150 journal papers and book chapters. She wrote the first edition of A Manual for Repertory Grid Technique 2nd Edition with Don Bannister for Academic Press in 1977.
She trained and worked as an occupational therapist for 10 years before taking a degree in psychology and a postgraduate diploma in clinical psychology in 1962. It was during her first job as a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, that she was introduced to George Kelly’s personal construct psychology and his repertory grid method. Both were revolutionary alternatives to the dominant behaviorism of the time. She found the view that we are all free agents responsible for what we make of the events which continually confront us particularly liberating. Since that time she has conducted research, together with teaching and writing, within the framework of Kelly’s ideas. Her main area of research has been stuttering, for which she used a form of repertory grid. She has also conducted research on weight disorders and various psychological problems.

Richard Bell is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. He is interested practical problems of measurement in clinical, organizational and educational settings. He has written extensively on the analysis of repertory grid data and has authored widely used software for the analysis of such data.

The influence of Don Bannister in arousing interest in George Kelly’s theory and methods of assessment has been profound. Even after his untimely death in 1986 his influence continues, through those he inspired, through his professional research and writings, and also through his four novels. In the year in which this second edition of the Manual for Repertory Grid Techniques is published the 15th International Congress in Personal Construct Psychology was held in Huddersfield, UK, focusing on that outstanding influence. He spent much of his professional life carrying out research for the UK Medical Research Council, which included a year working with George Kelly at Ohio State University in 1965. He saw the psychology of personal constructs as an approach to the person that was empowering, democratic and, above all, valuable in helping people understand themselves and others. He was insistent that psychologists should use what power and influence they have to make a difference in the lives of people. He would have taken great interest in the vast amount of new work that has been carried out with and into that tool which is detailed in this second edition of the book that he co-authored in 1977.

A Manual for Repertory Grid Technique 2nd Edition

By Fay Fransella

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2004 Fay Fransella
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780470854891

Chapter One

THE BASIS OF REPERTORY GRID TECHNIQUE

A scientist’s inventions assist him in two ways: they tell him what to expect and they help him to see it when it happens. Those that tell him what to expect are theoretical inventions and those that enable him to observe outcomes are instrumental inventions. The two types are never wholly independent of each other, and they usually stem from the same assumptions. This is unavoidable. Moreover, without his inventions, both theoretical and instrumental, man would be both disoriented and blind. He would not know where to look or how to see. (Kelly, 1969a, p.94)

GRIDS: WHAT ARE THEY?

George Kelly, physicist, mathematician and would-be engineer, loved mathematics. He regarded mathematics as ‘the purest form of construing’ (Hinkle, 1970). It would therefore have been surprising if he had not brought mathematics into his psychological theory in some form or other. He chose to do this by creating the repertory grid. He saw the grid as no more and no less than another way of stating his theory of personal constructs. It is not an ‘addon’. It is personal construct theory in action. He gives a detailed account of this relationship in the first in his series of three lectures on the function of interpretation in psychotherapy (Kelly, 1959).

His argument goes something like this. Suppose that Fred believes that people with cold eyes tend to be mean with their money. Let us suppose also that Fred is a psychologist and will undoubtedly yearn to give his notions a statistical foundation. Therefore it will not surprise us when he sets out to survey his landscape of people and judge them, in each case, in terms of the dimensions cold-eyed vs. warm-eyed and mean vs. generous. He may then cast his observations on, say, 100 people into the form of a Chi-square which may appear as follows.

Cold eyes Warm eyes

Mean 28 19

Generous 2 51

Chi-square=36.9 (P <50.001)

We can view these data in two ways. First, we can look upon them as telling us something about the nature of eye temperature and miserliness in people. We can say (given the customary cavils about experimental design) that at a given level of significance, cold vs. warm eyes are related to miserliness vs. generosity. We can proceed from there to offer explanations to account for the relationship, formulate consequent hypotheses and design further experiments to test them.

Alternatively, we can view these data as information about how Fred sees his world. The significant association that was found could be regarded as a sign that, for Fred, the constructs of cold-eyed vs. warm-eyed and mean vs. generous are related. We could go on to discuss further constructs of Fred which might be interlinked, and the total construct system of which these constructs are a part. We could consider what lines of action Fred might be prompted to take, viewing people thus – what kind of validating or invalidating experiences might strengthen or modify his mode of construing, and so on.

One approach does not deny the usefulness of the other, and personal construct theory takes the first into account in concerning itself with validation. Construing is the lively way in which we go about trying to anticipate events – real events as we construe them – in the outside world.

However, if we consider the second approach for a moment and comment on the data as revealing aspects of Fred’s personal construct system, then in his Chi-square we have the beginnings of repertory grid analysis. Many such Chi-squares are in grid data. We can also look at Fred’s construing in another way. According to Bell (in press), instead of thinking of Fred’s constructs in terms of degree of association (correlation) and Chi-square (statistical significance), we can see them in terms of prediction. To what extent does Fred predict that a person who is warm-eyed will thereby be generous? The correlation between these two constructs is 0.61. The correlation of course gives us more information than the Chi-square. It tells us that, for Fred, there is 37% of meaning in common between his two constructs. However, it does not tell us which is the more important construct to Fred – that is, which is the predicted and which is the predictor. This is discussed further in Chapter 4.

Whichever approach we use to understand the relationship between constructs, behind each single act of judgement that a person makes (consciously or unconsciously) lies his or her implicit theory about the realm of events within which he or she is making those judgements. Repertory grid technique is, in its multitude of forms, a way of exploring the structure and content of such implicit theories. Each of us has many such implicit theoretical beliefs about billiards or love affairs or accounting or children or God. In turn, our smaller theories (such as construct subsystems) are linked into the overall theory that we call a personal construct system.

In using the metaphor of ‘theory’, we are not arguing that such theories are formal and articulated. They may be verbal, non-verbal or pre-verbal, they may be tightly structured or loosely structured, they may be easily testable or almost too tangled to test, and they may be idiosyncratic or commonly held. However, they are theories in the sense of being networks of meaning through which we see and handle the universe of situations through which we move. In this sense, our theories – our personal construct system – might be referred to in other psychological approaches as our ‘personality’, our ‘attitudes’, our ‘habits’, our ‘reinforcement history’, our ‘information-coding system’, our ‘psychodynamics’, our ‘concepts’, our ‘philosophy’ or our ‘central nervous system’.

Kelly argues that it would be convenient and useful to view personal construct systems as being made up of hierarchically linked sets of bipolar constructs – nice-nasty, here-there, two-stroke-four-stroke, ugly-beautiful, alkali-acid, past-future, master-servant, odd-even, and so on. Thus a dictionary is a record of how verbalized constructs are publicly related. The difficulties of exploring construct systems, by grid or any other means, force us to focus more on verbalized and easily accessible constructs. However, we should never assume that a construct is the same as its verbal label. A construct is a discrimination, not a verbal label. We should accept that in talking about an individual’s personal construct system, we are talking about his or her stance towards the world – we are talking about a person. Thus Kelly describes a construct in the following terms:

A construct is like a reference axis. A basic dimension of appraisal, often unverbalised, frequently unsymbolised, and occasionally unsignified in any manner except by the elemental processes it governs. Behaviorally it can be regarded as an open channel of movement, and the system of constructs provides each man with his own personal network of action pathways, serving both to limit his movements and to open up to him passages of freedom which otherwise would be psychologically non-existent. (Kelly, 1969b, p.293)

Suppose that I am haunted by the feeling that the more people know my secrets, the less I will be liked. This can be summarized in diagrammatic form as follows.

Knows my secrets vs. Does not know my secrets

Does not like me vs. Likes me

It is possible to demonstrate by the mathematics of a grid that these particular constructs are linked for me in this way. However, even when the argument is supported by the mathematics of a grid investigation, it is necessarily an oversimplification of the probable state of affairs. We are singling out a pair of constructs from what is a very complex network. The value and meaning of these constructs can only ultimately be assessed in terms of their location within this entire network, which is a changing network in any case. However, suppose that the grid has revealed this aspect of my construing to you. You may then use it as a source of information about me, either as it presents itself or as subsumed under some higher-order construction of your own – for example, that it is essentially ‘neurotic’ (vs. ‘normal’). For indeed our constructs are not all equal – some are more meaningful or important to us than others.

However, I may use this revelation about my construct system to ascertain to what degree I think my interpersonal relationships are limited by this mode of construing – this kind of anticipation of how other people will respond to me. Yet more aspects of my construing may need to be examined in order to locate other constructions which I place upon the world, which in some way contradict or cut across this belief that the more people know my secrets, the less I will be liked. It may be that even while I am believing this I make special and exceptional cases, such as psychotherapists, priests or women. It may be that if I am drunk I believe I have a licence which takes away the effect of the ruling. It may be that I am changing my secrets and believe that they are becoming less objectionable. Finally, it may be that I am ceasing to operate the construction as a self-fulfilling prophesy, and new evidence may yet become available to me which radically alters this aspect of my interpretative system.

The purpose of grids is to inform us about the ways in which our system is evolving, and its limitations and possibilities. The results of the grid have often been regarded as a map of the construct system of an individual – a kind of idiographic cartography as contrasted with, say, the nomothetic cartography of the semantic differential (Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum, 1957). To the extent that a grid gives us a map of an individual’s construct system, it is probably about as accurate and informative as the maps of the American coastline which Columbus provided. At that, it may be a great deal more sensitive to the nature of the person than, say, a questionnaire. This issue of accuracy is referred to again in relation to the interpretation of one grid in Chapter 7.

The grid is perhaps best regarded as a particular form of structured interview. Our usual way of exploring another person’s construct system is by conversation. In talking to each other, we come to understand the way in which the other person views the world, what goes with what, what implies what, what is important and unimportant, and in what terms the person seeks to assess people, places and situations. The grid formalizes this process and assigns mathematical values to the relationships between a person’s constructs. It enables us to focus on particular subsystems of construing, and to note what is individual and surprising about the structure and content of a person’s outlook on the world. Yet the information it gives us is not novel or some peculiar product of our ‘scientific method’. It is a formalized version of the kind of information we are always seeking about each other, and the kind of understanding we are always in the process of gaining about each other.

THE GRID AS PART OF PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY

People often behave as if all that is needed for effective research or applied work is a single idea and an instrument. They ignore the fact that behind any single idea is a whole series of assumptions, and underlying any instrument is yet another series of assumptions. The assumptions underlying the ‘instrument’ may well contradict the assumptions implicit in the ‘idea’. Thus the grid method is often used quite without relation to its parent theory. It has often been regarded as some kind of measure of ‘attitudes’, ‘meaning’, ‘personality’ or ‘concepts’.

Yet people who use the grid thoughtfully will find themselves assuming the ‘truth’ of many of the assumptions of personal construct theory, even if they are ignorant of the theory as such. In the following account, attention is drawn to those aspects of the theory from which the grid is directly derived and where the relationship between theory and instrument needs to be borne in mind.

GRIDS: A MEASURE OF WHAT?

The model underlying personal construct psychology is explicitly the idea of ‘every man his own scientist’. Kelly suggests that we strive to make sense out of (give meaning to) our universe, ourselves and the particular situations that we encounter. To this end each of us creates and re-creates an implicit theoretical framework which, whether it is well or badly designed, is our personal construct system. In terms of this system we live, anticipate events, determine our behaviour and ask our questions. It is in terms of this same system that we evaluate outcomes and elaborate changes in the interpretative system itself. Thus in Kelly’s terms, we are ‘scientists’ who derive hypotheses (have expectations) from our theories (our personal construing). We subject these hypotheses to experimental testing (we bet on them behaviourally, and we take active risks in terms of them). We observe the results of our experiments (we live with the outcomes of our behaviour), we modify our theory (we change our minds, and we change ourselves), and so the cycle continues. We can, of course, also look inward and try to understand some of the mysteries of our own selves.

Kelly devised the repertory grid technique as a method for exploring personal construct systems. It is an attempt to stand in others’ shoes, to see their world as they see it, and to understand their situation and their concerns. Kelly grounded his theory in the mathematical relationships he saw between the constructs. For instance, he says:

Now let us turn to a personal system made up of a whole lot of constructs. Such a system is a complex, or, if you don’t mind the term, a conceptual grid within which events can be seen in depth or in their psychological dimensions. (Kelly, 1959, p.13)

He talks of a series of events, a, b, c, … k, which are dealt with by construing them as being identified with one pole or the other of construct A – that is, falling into two categories. Now the events can be dealt with in a more complex fashion by employing a second construct B. The events can now be described by four categories. With a third construct C, eight categories can be abstracted. The number of such groupings in a system of dichotomous constructs will be equal to [2.sup.n], where n is the number of constructs applied.

Continues…
Excerpted from A Manual for Repertory Grid Technique 2nd Editionby Fay Fransella Copyright © 2004 by Fay Fransella. Excerpted by permission.
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