Transcript George Kelly

GEORGE KELLY
By: Meagan Lilley
Personal
Construct
Theory and
Concepts
GEORGE KELLY
Born April 28, 1905
His family was one
of the last
homesteaders of
the American
frontier
Patchwork education
Graduated with a degree in physics and
mathematics
Got his Bachelor of Education degree at
Edinburgh, Scotland
In 1931, he graduated from the University
of Iowa with a PH.D. in psychology
His thesis was on speech and reading
disabilities
GEORGE KELLY
 During time of the Great Depression/Dust Bowl
 Taught School Psychology developing a program of traveling
clinics
 offered free assessment and consultation services to children
 His work was so innovative that it was funded directly by an
act of the state legislature
 World War II- the aviation psychology branch in the U.S. Navy
 Taught at University of Maryland
 Directed the clinical psychology program at Ohio State
University
 For 20 years
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONAL
CONSTRUCTS
 Inspired by Korzybski’s general semantics and
Monroe’s psychodrama
 “The Psychology of Personal Constructs” -1955
 achieved immediate international recognition
 Elected President of the Clinical and the Consulting
Divisions of the APA
 Served as President of the American Board of
Examiners in Professional Psychology
 He died on March 6, 1967 at the age of 61.
PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY
 The main view - is that a person's unique
psychological processes are channeled by the way she
or he anticipates events
 Main drivers of our mind
 anticipation
 Prediction
 "Every man is, in his own particular way, a scientist“
 Start at birth and continue refining our theories as we
grow up
CONSTRUCTS
 Theories are built up from a system of constructs
 Our mind is filled up with these constructs, at a
low level of awareness
 He believed that some constructs are preverbal
 A given person or set of people or any event or
circumstance can be characterized fairly
precisely by the set of constructs we apply to it
and the position of the thing within the range of
each construct
CONTINUED…
Constructs are applied to anything we put our
attention to, and also strongly influence what
we fix our attention on.
We interpret reality by making constructs
He believed in a non-invasive approach to
psychotherapy
The therapist should just act as a facilitator of
the patient
REPERTORY GRID
 He developed the Repertory Grid Interview
technique
 First the patient selects about seven elements on
the patient or therapist is trying to discover
 The test requires the person to compare and
contrast sets of three significant people
 show some important way that two of the figures are
alike, and different from the third
REPERTORY GRID
 Repeating the procedure with different sets of three
elements reveals several constructs the patient
might not have been fully aware of
 Rows represent constructs found
 Columns represent the elements
 A rating determines the position of each element
within each construct
 The format of the repertory grid basically guides the
respondent in making their own questionnaire while
showing comparisons across different people or
groups
REPERTORY GRID
 The blend of projective and objective testing has
made the grid useful to both clinicians and scientists
seeking to understand how different people and
groups organize their view of themselves and the
world
REPERTORY
GRID
EXAMPLE
RESOURCES
 http://www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/kelly.html
 http://www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/repgridmethods.html
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kelly_(psyc
hologist)
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repertory_Grid