Constructs

Personal construct theory is an example of a theoretical perspective on the way people make sense of their experiences/worlds - developed by George Kelly.

Kelly considered that individuals construe the world through a system of bipolar constructs, although many of these may be implicit constructs (the person uses them, but may not realise they are doing so). The constructs are the basis of discrimination made during the perceptual-conceptual process.

What did Kelly (1963: 69-70) mean by a construct?

“…we use the term construct in a manner which is somewhat parallel to the common usage of ‘concept’. … We have included, as indeed some recent users of the term ‘concept’ have done, the more concretistic concepts which nineteenth century psychologists would have insisted upon calling ‘percepts’. The notion of a ‘percept’ has always carried the idea of its being a personal act - in that sense, our construct is in the tradition of ‘percepts’. But we also see our construct as involving abstraction - in that sense our  construct bears a resemblance to the traditional usage of ‘concept’.”

Kelly, G. (1963). A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Watts and Pope (1985: 9) have argued that:

“…Kelly has contributed to a long standing debate about the nature and status of ‘concepts’. What Kelly was rejecting was the ‘traditional school’, or abstractionist view of concept formation in favour of a current appreciation of concepts as personalised organisations of experience. … The first is representative of the notion that concepts are nature’s imprint on a passive mind, the second of the outcome of an active construction of meaning from experience. Given the growing acceptance of this second view, the distinction between a concept and a construct becomes increasingly blurred.”

Watts, D. M., & Pope, M. L. (1985). Modulation and Fragmentation: some cases from science education. Paper presented at the 6th International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology.

Constructs are not purely conceptual:

Kelly sought to break down the traditional distinction between cognition and affect

“The psychology of personal constructs is built upon an intellectual model, to be sure, but its application is not intended to be limited to that which is ordinarily called intellectual or cognitive. It is also taken to apply to that which is commonly called emotional or affective and to that which has to do with action or conation. The classical threefold division of psychology into cognition, affection, and conation has been completely abandoned in the psychology of personal constructs.” (Kelly, 1963: 130.)

“It is argued that Kelly’s description of construct systems is purely a description of ‘thinking’ and thereby deals with only one aspect of the person, the ‘rational’ aspect. But Kelly did not accept the cognition-emotion division as intrinsically valid … So a construct is not a ‘thought’ or a ‘feeling’; it is a discrimination. It is part of the way you stand towards your world as a complete person.” (Bannister & Fransella, 1986: 21.)

Bannister, D., & Fransella, F. (1986). Inquiring Man: The Psychology of Personal Constructs (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.

For Kelly all constructs are personal*

“In theoretical terms all constructs are personal. Even constructs drawn from say science or technology which have highly publicly specified relationships and implications and which have had their predictive validity tested and retested are still personal. They are personal in the sense that each person has to acquire them and integrate them into his [sic] total system. … there might be much of interest to be investigated using grids where the elements and constructs are drawn from areas of high public agreement.” (Fransella & Bannister, 1977, p.117)

Fransella, F., & Bannister, D. (1977). A Manual for Repertory Grid Technique. London: Academic Press.

“…when we use the notion of ‘construct’ …we are talking about a psychological process in a living person. Such construct has, for us, no existence independent of the person whose thinking it characterizes.” (Kelly, 1958/1969: 87)

Kelly, G. (1958/1969). Man's construction of his alternatives. In B. Maher (Ed.), Clinical Pystchology and Personality: The selected papers of George Kelly (pp. 66-93). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

* Compare this with Vygotsky’s distinction between spontaneous concepts and those learnt through cultural mediation (‘scientific’ or ‘academic’ concepts) - although the process of conceptual development discussed by Vygotsky implies that in practice we operate with melded concepts (see Taber, K. S. (2013). Modelling Learners and Learning in Science Education: Developing representations of concepts, conceptual structure and conceptual change to inform teaching and research. Dordrecht: Springer).

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