ACADEMIC ATTITUDES
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There’s a certain approach taken to repertory grids, and especially to the
theoretical underpinning, personal construct psychology, in university
psychology departments. The theory tends to be offered, at a rather basic
level, as part of course on personality, and the technique, where it’s made
available, in a two-hour seminar workshop in which the bare bones are
practised but the applications, variants, and solutions to practical problems –
‘how do I present the grid results of a large sample of people rather than the
single person on whom I practised?’ being the most common – are never
addressed in any detail.
The attitude stems from a preference for positivist epistemology within the
psychological profession, even where the more recent constructivist
approaches are known about, and the related techniques understood. (If
you’re curious about all this, you might like to glance at Jankowicz, 1987a;
Neimeyer, 1983, or the fuller treatment in Neimeyer, 1985.)
The result has been that the repertory grid technique is little used beyond its
specialist adherents, and the central value of personal construct psychology as
the basis for understanding all epistemologies in the first place has been
scandalously neglected – often in favour of a pointless argument between
proponents of qualitative versus quantitative methods, statistical versus
experiential approaches, all of which is largely irrelevant. And so, people
like myself, part of an international network of personal construct
psychologists numbering no more, I would guess, than a thousand
worldwide, are approached to train those who should already be trained.
One does what one can, and this book is part of it.