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DOING
PSYCHOLOGY THAT COUNTS: GEORGE KELLY'S INFLUENCE
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David V. Canter
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The School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, UK
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ORIGINS IN THE 1960’S
It was in the final year of my
undergraduate degree, in 1964, that I was introduced to the subversive
ideas of
George Kelly. This was the era of the Beatles and the Cuban missile
crisis that
we can now see, with the benefit of hindsight, as the flowering of
optimistic
challenges to the old order that had been cleared away by the Second
World War.
In my undergraduate days support for
Nuclear
Disarmament went hand in hand with the view that laboratory based
studies of people,
particularly of the limited sample, of about 8% of the population, who
were
undergraduate students at the time, was totally artificial. There was a
stream
of thought, to which I still subscribe, that psychologists needed to
get out
into the streets and see how people actually made sense of their lives,
when
not asked to press buttons in response to flashing lights. Part of this
perspective was given impetus when I was introduced to the two
Biblical-like
volumes of Kelly’s magnum opus.
Kelly’s elementary, but profound, claim
that we needed to understand an individual’s ways of conceptualising
the world
in his/her own constructs, was a wonderful antidote to lingering
Skinnerian
behaviourism that was the orthodoxy in those days. The methodology he
developed
that captured a visual image of the structure of those constructs was
one of
the most exciting discoveries I made in my psychological training.
I had already been exposed to factor
analysis and to Osgood’s ‘semantic differential’, but the application
of the
notion of a construct space to the mental world of an individual has
had a profound
influence on all my thinking and been of immeasurable value to many of
the
applications of psychology in which I have been involved.
The excitement of PCP was given further
charge by intermittent contact with George Kelly’s representative on
earth, Don
Bannister. His highly subversive campaign against the traditions of
British
psychology and, as he put it, its ‘hardening of the categories’ by
limiting
what was regarded as acceptable psychology is, sadly, even more
pertinent today
as the oligarchy that manages the Research
Assessment Exercise is still defining
what is good or bad psychology in very narrow terms. The PCP viewpoint
enables
us to understand how locked in their own construct systems so many
senior psychologists
are, but our acceptance that they have a distinct world view does not
mean that
we need to accept their viewpoint.
The value of the central notion of a
‘construct
system’ has even spread out to my interest in musical composition. It
helps me
to understand that I, or any other composer, have a framework of
constructs
that are unravelled and given shape during the composing process. The
interaction with the musical score helps to polish and shape those
constructs,
which will often be non-verbal.
CONSTRUCTS WITHOUT TEARS:
THE MULTIPLE
SORTING TASK
The great achievement of PCP is to have
a
rich theoretical framework closely tied into a fertile methodology. I
have
always been impressed by how the theory and methodology of PCP are so
well integrated
that it is difficult to tell which is the dominant partner. I have
tried to
emulate this in my own work.
But there have always been two aspects
of
the methodology with which I am uncomfortable. One is the insistence on
always
determining both poles of a bi-polar construct. Indeed, even the claim
that all
constructs are implicitly bi-polar seems to me an empirical issue
rather than
an axiomatic one. There do appear to be important contexts in which
bi-polarity
is not the dominant part of the construct system. Ways of
conceptualising colours
may be one good example, where the four way split of red, yellow, blue
and green
seems to have more empirical support. Reducing each of these dominant
hues to a
distinct construct still raises questions about what its opposite is.
Although
we are dealing with physical attributes here I think there are many
psychological
constructs that do not have a comfortable opposite pole, most notably
when
activities are being construed in terms of their dominant purpose, such
as
preparation, recreation, or study.
The second discomfort I have is with the
ponderous,
time-consuming quality of the fully orthodox Repertory Grid. As many
researchers
have found the initial construct elicitation process is often the most
powerful
part of the whole process. That is where the dominant aspects of the
individual’s
perspective become apparent.
These two criticisms of the repertory
grid
led me to work with my PhD students in the 1970’s (Canter, Brown &
Richardson, 1976) to develop a procedure that was really an elaboration
of the
triadic construct elicitation procedure, which was eventually published
under
the label of the Multiple Sorting
Task (MST) by Canter, Brown, &Groat
(1985).
The MST consists of asking people to
sort
elements into as many groups as they like with as many elements in each
group
as they like and then to describe the basis of their categorisation
scheme.
Once the first sort is completed, we may ask them to have another go to
see if
they can come up with a different classification scheme. We can also
ask them
to sort the elements into a ‘forced’ sort in which we give them the
dominant
construct, such as preference or solvability.
One of the reasons for the decade long
gap
between our first development of the approach and its eventual
publication was
that it turned out to be remarkably to difficult to work out how to
maintain
the idiosyncratic qualities of the initial sortings and still produce
some
coherent summary of the data. Any creation of an association matrix, in
which
the frequency with which items are assigned to similar categories are
counted,
hides the differences between individuals.
Eventually we found that a rather
unusual
multi-dimensional scaling procedure, known as Multidimensional Scalogram
Analysis (MSA) developed by Lingoes and Guttman in the 1960’s
(Lingoes, 1973)
allowed us to represent the elements being sorted as a spatial
configuration,
across a whole set of sorts, whilst also allowing us to see clearly the
ways in
which different individual sorts contributed to the overall
configuration. We
could do this for a number of sorts for one individual or by taking a
group of
sortings from a number of individuals. The individual and ‘group grid’
is
therefore possible to generate without the need for anyone in the group
to use
the same constructs as anyone else.
We later realised that in a sense we are
exploring
a group decision making process about the categorisation of the
elements, and
did eventually set up studies to explore directly how this approach
could facilitate
group discussions (Wilson & Canter, 1993). This paper with my
colleague
Margaret Wilson is therefore a particularly full introduction to the
whole
approach.
We have found the MST to be very
powerful
in a great range of different applications, and I have supervised at
least half
a dozen PhD’s built around this methodology. We have applied it to
topics as varied
as exploring the nature of hostels available for alcoholics, the
differences
between transvestites and transsexuals in their conceptualization of
gender,
the way people construe their living rooms, a senior management team’s
understanding
of all the team members and their role in the organization, and other
examples
to which I shall now turn.
ARCHITECTURE
AS A CONSTRUCT SYSTEM
One particularly interesting application
of
the sorting procedure is its use as a tool for designing buildings.
This application
is based on the notion that buildings reflect the construct system of
their
designers and that in many cases the more fully the designer can draw
upon the
conceptualisations of the users the more effective the building will
be. I have
applied this approach to the briefing of architects in major design
projects,
such as the design of a Casino, an engineering centre for a car and bus
manufacturer (described in Canter, 1982) and a design centre for a
petrochemical
manufacturer (Canter & Scott, 1996). These were large, complex
projects,
but one in which the conceptualisation of the users is most clearly
reflected in
the redesign of a ward for a psychogeriatric population in need of
constant
medical care (Canter & Scott, 1996).
It was the construct system of the
nurses
and other professionals who worked on this ward that was taken as the
basis for
conceptualising what the redesign should accommodate.
Figure 1
(drawn from page 249 of Canter &
King, 1996) shows the list of activities that the ward accommodates,
developed
from interviews with all the professionals involved in the ward.
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List of 40 activities
used in activity sorting
1. Sleeping in chairs
2.
Sleeping in bed
3. O.T.
on ward
4.
Making beds
5.
Bathing
6.
Physiotherapy on ward
7.
Cleaning patients
8.
Toileting
9.
Visits from relatives
10.
Cleaning patients after meals
11.
Visits from chaplain
12.
Doctor visits
13.
Listening to records
14.
Reading/looking at papers
15.
Patients tea time
16.
Staff tea-break
17.
Sitting alone
18.
Watching T.V.
19.
Talking to other patients
20.
Sitting in a group |
21. O.T. trips and outings
22.
Visits to O.T. centre
23.
Feeding by spoon
24.
Eating
25.
Parties for patients
26.
Changing bandages/dressings
27.
Patients looking out of windows
28.
Patients walking around
29.
Preparing drinks for patients
30.
Cleaning dishes after meals
31.
Staff
serving food
32.
Patient count
33.
Cleaning floors
34.
Patient observation
35.
Staff
changeover
36.
Medicine round
37.
Patient observation and checking during day
38.
Admission of new patients
39.
Patients sitting outside
40.
Laundry duties
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Figure 1: List of activities used for the
sorting task in the ward redesign project
These 40 activities were then sorted by
many different members of staff and their sortings summarised using MSA
(as
described in Canter et al, 1985). The resulting configuration is given
in
Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: MSA results for the
sorting of 40
ward activities by 15 ward staff
This figure shows
that the nurses made a
clear distinction between three groups of activities. One to the right
of the
plot is all those activities that are regarded as ‘normal’ by the staff
and
therefore of therapeutic value as enhancing the daily experience of the
patients.
It is noteworthy that at the bottom of
this
region are activities that involve contact with professionals not
normally
based on the ward such as the doctor, chaplain and occupational
therapists.
This contrasts with the activities at the top of the region which
involves
contact with other patients and visits from relatives.
To the left of the plot are activities
that
have a much stronger professional emphasis, These are distinguished at
the top
into activities that only involve the staff and not the patients, such
as
laundry duty, and those that involve direct contact with the patients
in a
professional capacity.
Similar sortings were also carried out
on
the actual patients, which revealed the dominant construct of how much
care the
patients needed. In addition a ‘spatial sorting’, was carried out,
which had
been developed by Arie Peled to reveal the way that people saw the
actual
spatial relationships, in the abstract, between the activities (Peled,
1976).
The results of these various analyses
were
combined. They led to the identification of a number of distinct types
of
place: areas for patients on their own, areas for specific sub-sets of
essentially group activities, such as physiotherapy, and a central
functional
area in which the nurses are involved closely with the patients, as
shown in
Figure 3.
Figure 3: Schematic representation of the
main types of place needed and their general spatial relationships
for the
Ward redesign project.
This schematic representation was
enriched
in the design proposal with information about the constructs that
characterised
the different locations, including the need to house patients needing
different
levels of care. The whole framework was then used to consider the
existing
building and how it might be modified to accommodate the emergent
conceptual
structure. This gave rise to a detailed proposal for the redesign that
everyone
involved was very excited about.
As so often happens with innovative
design
projects other forces were at play whilst we were doing this
commissioned work.
They decided the whole hospital sight should be abandoned and so it was
sold
off to become accommodation for an orthodox religious community.
PRODUCT MAPS AND MARKET
GAPS
The representation of a construct system
of
activities as an actual set of spaces in a building has parallels with
the
representation of elements as entities within a conceptual space. If
this conceptual
space is regarded as a domain of products then gaps within this space
could be
taken as opportunities within the market place for new products.
I have been involved in a number of
commercial studies that do look directly for the metaphorical ‘gaps in
the
market’ by seeing where the holes are in consumers’ conceptual systems.
The
clearest and most successful application of this approach was in a
study of the
biscuit and confectionary market.
The practical advantage of studying
biscuits is that the MST can be conducted with participants sorting the
actual
products. We have also been able to take the individual sorting a step
further,
following up the idea that we are dealing with a group decision making
process,
and give the group the MSA ‘map’ with the biscuits on it. This map is
then used
as a basis for a ‘focus group’ discussion, thereby combining the
individual
constructs with the benefits that accrue from exploring the structure
of these
constructs in a group.
Figure 4 shows the MSA output for the
sorting
of 47 different biscuits and confectionary. As with Figure 2 above, the
closer
together any two elements are the more likely they are to be assigned
to the
same category by the respondents. This particular figure is based on
results
from 32 respondents.
Figure 4: MSA derived from the free sorting
of 47 biscuits by 32 respondents. X indicates a major new product
opportunity (turn clockwise)
The details in Figure 4 are not as
important as the overall structure. This shows a clear distinction
between the
confectionary in the region at the top right, running from Jamie Dodgers to Lyons Fruit Pies,
and that biscuits that are at lower left of the plot, running
in a diagonal from Crawfords Cheese
Specials to Jacobs Cream
Crackers.
Thus although
there are
many marketing
details that can be drawn from Figure 4, especially when market share
is incorporated,
this broad division between the savouries and the sweet biscuits that
comes
close around the Cheese Specials
and the Jamie Dodgers, is of
particular interest.
It suggests that consumers make a big distinction between savoury and
sweet
biscuits. But the gap where these two regions meet indicates that there
is the
possibility that the distinction is not as total as may have been
anticipated.
In other words, the gap in the centre of
the plot suggests the possibility of a product that draws on some of
the
qualities of the savouries and also some of the qualities of the sweet
products. The discussion with respondents made clear that the savouries
were
generally regarded as good and wholesome but not very interesting,
whereas the
sweets were enjoyable but rather naughty.
It was therefore proposed therefore that
there was room in the market place for a ‘wholesome sweet biscuit’
defined by
the region marked with an X on Figure 4. Thus the Hobnob was born. It turned
out to be unusual in that most new products quickly fade away. But
although
this study was done over two decades ago the brand is still going
strong.
CONCEPTUALISING
CRIME SCENES
The mapping of construct systems with activities
and confectionary has an aspect to it that is not often emphasised in
the PCP
literature, although fundamental to Kelly’s ideas. This is the
assumption that
the construct system is the basis for action. Most obviously in the
case of
biscuits the action is the actual purchase of products.
However, there are situations in which
the
construct system has even stronger life and death implications, by
being the
basis of crucial decisions that can affect many lives. The
conceptualisation of
possibilities opens the way to action in the context of demanding
decision
making.
One area in which this is of especial
interest is in the decision making of those Senior Investigating
Officers who
lead homicide investigations. This area is of interest for many
reasons, but I
will mention just a couple. One is that this exceptionally important
activity,
which fills TV and published fiction and is so often a dominant part of
the
news, has been very little explored. Another is that the emergence of
Investigative Psychology (cf. Canter & Young, 2003) was based on
the idea
that ‘Offender Profiles’ could be given to investigating officers to
characterise an unknown offender. Yet how these ‘profiles’ might
integrate with
construct systems of detectives was never explored.
A PhD student of mine, Michelle Wright,
has
therefore been exploring the construct systems of investigating
officers. Once
again the MST has been the basis of her explorations, but this time she
is
using photographs of murder scenes, with brief descriptions of the
scene as
shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Examples of two crime scene
photographs used in the MST by Senior Investigating Officers.
A variety of experienced and less
experienced
police officers sort these pictures into groups in accord with their
understanding of the nature of the murder. This is used as the basis of
an interview
about how they approach the task of murder investigation.
It is interesting that these detectives
see
the task of sorting the crime scenes, and describing their
categorisations, as
a valid representation of the task they face when got out of bed to go
and take
charge of an investigation. It is also worth recording that they are
very
willing to develop quite detailed ideas of what went on and gave rise
to the
crime from this somewhat limited information. In other words, it is
clear from
this study that the business of developing ‘profiles’ of an offender is
not
unique to the FBI or people schooled in any particular tradition. It is
rather
an integral aspect of being an informed, experienced investigator.
From this perspective, then, Criminal Offender
Profiling, Crime Scene
Analysis, Psychological
Profiling and all the other
terms that are used to indicate the drawing of inferences about an
offender
from the way a crime is committed, are no more or less than the
articulation of
a construct system for conceptualising how offences may differ from
each other
and the implications those differences have.
What we need to know is the structure of
this construct system; what the dominant themes, or latent meanings,
are within
it. By knowing the cognitive structure we can then see how that can be
enriched
by insights from empirical psychology. The MSA results given in Figure
6 from
the first small sample of detectives are thus a helpful step forward.
Figure 6: MSA of 20 crime scene photographs
sorted by Senior Investigating Officers
This spatial representation of the
overall
construct systems of detectives is particularly interesting because it
is
possible to determine a very simple underlying structure to the
conceptualisations.
These latent meanings are indicated by lines drawn on the plot. They
show that
the crime scenes can be divided up on the basis of two basic (and yes I
have to
admit) bi-polar constructs. They relate to whether the victim is male
or
female, and whether the location is indoors or outdoors.
From these two constructs a wealth of
possibilities are drawn by these investigating officers of what might
have
happened in the crime. From these assumed criminal events the officers
then
develop ideas about who the likely culprit is and how s/he may be
found.
Of particular theoretical importance
here
is that these constructs are taken as the basis for an assumed
narrative. They
are given life by hypotheses about possible protagonists and the series
of
unfolding events in which they are engaged. So, for example a woman
found dead
indoors will initially be considered as the victim of a domestic row
between
people who have a long-standing relationship. On the other hand a man
found
outdoors will set in motion early speculations about brawls between
men,
whereas women outdoors and men indoors will be thought of as victims of
some
other crime that has given rise to murder.
PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF
CRIMINALS
The idea that constructs imply
narratives
is one that I have been particularly interested in over the past few
years. PCP
is all too often a static consideration of an individual at a point in
time, a
cross-section through their unfolding life. Yet Kelly shares with
Skinner the
view of people as active organisms; agents taking part in the world and
modifying their construct systems as a consequence. But this dynamic
change
over time is not very often given emphasis in the personal construct
studies of
which I am aware.
I have therefore been trying for some
time
to get to grips with how people embed themselves in an unfolding
narrative. The
first exploration of this was in my book Criminal Shadows (Canter, 1995), in
which I considered the implicit narratives that serial killers and
rapists
reveal within their crimes. More recently I have tried to get to their
conceptualisations
more directly (Canter, Kaouri & Ioannou, 2003). I have done this by
arguing
that the emotions involved in a crime when taken together with the role
they
assign to themselves during the crime implies their involvement in a
personal
narrative that gives dynamism and significance to their crimes.
Questionnaires completed by criminals
describing
how they felt and whether they thought of themselves, for instance, as
a victim
or hero at the time allow us to explore whether there are a set of
distinct
storylines that they may be drawing on. These stories imply other key
players
and significant constructs, but for the moment we are working at the
higher
level of identifying the dominant themes in their criminal activity.
Earlier
work on emotions (Canter & Ioannou, 2004) did show some interesting
results, but when combined with a questionnaire about the roles the
results, as
shown in Figure 7, are even clearer.
Figure 7: Smallest
Space Analysis of answers
to questions about emotions and roles experienced while committing a
crime
The analysis in Figure 7 is a Smallest
Space Analysis. This represents the rank order of the inverse of
the
correlations between any two questions as the rank order of the
distances
between those questions as represented as points on the configuration
(cf Canter,
1983, or Shye, Elizur & Hoffman, 1994). The regions are interpreted
from the
common meanings of items within them, much factors are interpreted from
the loadings
of variables on the factors.
In Figure 7 four distinct regions can be
readily discerned. At the top the items of feeling thoughtful and calm
are
interspersed with the roles of a professional who was just doing a job
of work.
To the right of this is a region characterised by feeling lonely and
helpless
like a victim. Below this are terms that imply the narrative of revenge
coming
out of being worried and angry. The fourth group has the offender
feeling
excited about taking risks as part of an adventure.
These four implicit narratives are
particularly interesting because they have parallels to the four
canonical
narratives identified by Frye (1957) as the basis of all stories, as
outlined
by Canter et al (2003). This helps us to build bridges between PCP and
the
dominant narratives of our culture. Although constructs are personal,
it has
never been denied that they emerge from a social context. They must be
given life
by the way they are rooted in the unfolding storylines that
characterise any society.
A PCP APPROACH TO M.O.
The link between constructs and actions
does seem to me to be a very important one that is too often neglected.
It
suggests to me, also, that it makes sense to explore what I like to
think of as
implicit or non-verbal construct systems. These are the patterns of
actions
that a person performs in particular sorts of situations. So just as we
can
produce a map like representation of an individual’s cognitive
structure,
derived from a repertory grid or an MST, so we can see the non-verbal
structure
of that person’s actions if we have enough information of what they do
in a variety
of situations.
The notion of modus operandi (m.o.) is not
a very clear one, but in general suggests a pattern of behaviour that
is
characteristic of an individual (Canter & Youngs, 2003). In popular
thought
it is seen as a distinct ‘signature’ of the offender that is more or
less
unique to a particular person. In fact it is as rare for any criminal
to have a
unique and distinct way of committing a crime as it is for anyone else
to have
a unique and distinct way of doing anything, whether it is as banal as
having
breakfast or as heavily significant as giving a lecture. There will be
aspects
of what a person does on different situations that are reasonably
consistent
and possibly crucial to the way s/he acts and other actions that they
carry out
on some occasions but not on others.
If this pattern of
actions is thought of as
an implicit system, akin to and growing out of their construct system,
then it
makes sense to model their actions in much the same way as we model a
personal
construct system. We take a set of actions that the person carries out
across a
range of similar situations. Those actions that most frequently
co-occur we
show as being highly related and those that are less likely to co-occur
we show
as distinct from each other. This gives us a pattern of actions
arranged in
terms of their degrees of co-occurrence.
We have found this possible to do and
instructive to look at for criminals, in particular burglars. Figure 8
shows
two separate SSA analyses for two different serial burglars. In effect
this is
a way of representing each burglar’s m.o. as if it were a construct
system of
actions.
Figure 8-1
Figure 8-2
Figure 8: SSA’s of two different offenders
who have each committed 15 burglaries. The points are action and the
coloured
regions indicate the frequency of those actions across the crimes, with
red the
most frequent and blue the least
In a variety of studies
(reviewed in Canter
& Youngs, 2003) we have found that the frequency of any action
contributes
to our understanding of the structure of those actions. Therefore in
Figure 8
frequency contours have been turned into coloured regions. They thus
show
interesting differences between the patterns of actions of these two
offenders.
The offender on the left reveals a
number
of distinct foci to his activities. He is a man of many roles who seems
to
select his actions for the crime in question. He may climb into the
building,
or force the lock. He may prepare his getaway in some cases but not in
others.
This contrasts with the offender on the right who has a very distinct
m.o. He
typically climbs into the building and is untidy in his search.
We do not know as yet how these
different
behavioural structures relate to the experiences of the offender or
even the
sort of offender he thinks he is. Such a combination of data is
extremely difficult
to obtain because the different aspects of it are archived in very
different
places under the control of different institutions with different
access
hurdles. But at least we are opening up a productive way of dealing
with the
slippery concept of modus operandi
and showing how it may be related to more
precise ideas of construct systems and personal narratives.
FACET THEORY
Hopefully those who have read this far
will
have accepted that the work described is powerfully influenced by
Kelly’s
theory. They may therefore be surprised that the many works cited so
rarely
make a clear cross-reference to the PCP literature. This is a weakness
of those
publications but there is an explanation, if not an excuse.
The methodologies on which I have drawn
are
derived very strongly from the work of Louis Guttman and his Facet Theory (cf.
Canter, 1983, 1985, Shye et al, 1994). This is a theory about how
science works
rather than about human beings as such, but it is an approach to
science that
is remarkably compatible with PCP, being fundamentally alternative
constructivist.
Figure 9: Components of a theory (Guttman)
In summary as shown in the diagram of
Figure 9, Guttman’s facet approach enshrines the idea that there are
four
components to any theory. A framework for describing the key concepts
of the
theory and their relationships to each other, which Guttman calls ‘a
definitional system’ but which we could recognise as the scientist’s
construct
system. There are, secondly, a set of observations, some aspect of
which are
taken as being of significance for the theory. So here again we have
the
representation of the construct system within the empirical
observations.
Thirdly, any theory requires some
proposal
of what aspects of the construct system should correspond to the
empirical
observations. In Guttman’s terms this correspondence is usually taken
to be
features of the regional structures in the MDS analyses that are
carried out on
the data. He always emphasised as well that the correspondence needed
some
rationale that takes the argument back to natural language.
The application of Facet Theory to an
individual or a group therefore seems to me to be remarkably similar to
discussing their construct system.
I was always puzzled by the close link
between these two approaches and was fortunate to be able to discuss
this
directly with Guttman himself. He was aware of Kelly’s work, but had
never met
Kelly himself. He did however indicate that he had contributed a
chapter to a
book Kelly had edited.
It has taken me 25 years to find this
chapter because Guttman himself had not note of the details, but
spurred on by
the meeting at the University of Hertfordshire in September 2006 I set searches in motion and was
delighted to
locate the chapter.
It turns out that Kelly was a Lt Cdr in
the US army during the Second World War, when a small army of
psychologists were working for the military. Towards the end of the
war, over
27-28 November 1945, he chaired a conference for the army in Maryland.
The
conference was on New Methods in
Applied Psychology. He then edited the
published proceedings. Whether the conference was what we would now
call a
‘virtual’ conference, I do not know, because as I mentioned Guttman
told me he
had never met Kelly. But this shows that there was an overlap in their
interests
at the time. Guttman was in his mid-20’s at the time and had just
developed the
‘scale’ that later took his name. Kelly was obviously moving towards
his theory
of personal constructs but had not, as far as I can tell, yet published
any
details of it.
What I find
most
exciting, though, was the
title of the conference. It was about methods and it was seen as
applied
psychology, not some arid area of theory development. Yet both Kelly
and
Guttman later formulated their approaches within frameworks that were
quite
clearly theories in a very strong sense. |
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REFERENCES |
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Canter, D. (1982). Psychology and
environmental design in S. Canter & D. Canter (eds). Psychology
in practice. Chicester: Wiley, 289-310
Canter, D. (1983). The potential of
Facet
Theory for applied social psychology, Quality
and Quantity, 17, 35-67
Canter,D. (Ed) (1985). Facet
Theory: approaches to social research. New York:
Springer-Verlag
Canter, D. (1995). Criminal
shadows: inner
narratives of evil. London: Harper Collins.
Canter, D., Brown, J. & Groat, L.
(1985).
A multiple sorting procedure for studying conceptual systems, in M.
Brenner, J.
Brown, & D. Canter (eds). The research
interview: uses and approaches. London:
Academic
Press 79- 114 [also in D. Canter (ed). Psychology
in action. Aldershot: Datmouth, 71-106 ]
Canter, D., Brown, J. & Richardson,
H.
(1976). Constructs without tears: is there life beyond the grid? Paper
presented to the British Psychological Society Conference, Exeter.
Canter, D.V.,
& Ioannou, M. (2004). Criminals' emotional experiences during
crimes. International
Journal of Forensic Psychology, 1,
71-81.
Canter, D., Kaouri, C., & Ioannou,
M.
(2003). The facet structure of criminal narratives in S. Levy & D.
Elizur
(eds). Facet Theory: towards
cumulative social science 27-38.
Canter, D. & King, K. (1996). Ward
development project, in D. Canter (ed). Psychology
in action. Aldershot: Datmouth, 239-254
Canter, D. & Scott, M.
(1996). Designing a research centre. in D. Canter (ed). Psychology
in action. Aldershot:
Datmouth, 255-274
Canter, D. & Youngs, D. (2003).
Beyond
offender profiling: the need for an investigative psychology in R. Bull
and D.
Carson (eds). Handbook of psychology and legal contexts. Chichester: Wiley
171-205
Frye, N.
(1957). Anatomy of criticism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press
Lingoes, J.C. (1973). The
Guttman-Lingoes nonmetric program series. Ann Arbor:
Mathesis
press.
Peled, A. (1976) The Strathclyde
Location
Test, in P. Sudefeld & J.A. Russell (Ed.) The
behavioral basis of design. Stroudsburg: Dowden, Hutchinson and
Ross
Shye,S., Elizur, D. & Hoffman, M.
(1994). Introduction to Facet Theory. London:
Sage
Wilson, M., Canter, D.V. (1993). Shared concepts in
group decision making: a
model for decisions based on qualitative data. British
Journal of Social
Psychology 32, 159-172
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The article is based
on a talk given at the conference on 'PCP: a personal story' organised
by
the Centre for Personal Construct at the University of Hertfordshire, UK,
on September 29, 2006. |
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
David
V. Canter, PhD, AcSS, FBPsS, FAPA,
FRSA, C.Psychol, Directs the Centre for Investigative Psychology that
he set up
at The University of Liverpool in 1994. He has published very widely on
many
aspects of Environmental and Forensic Psychology, including an award
winning
book Criminal Shadows. His
more recent popular publication summarising
his
recent development of geographical profiling, Mapping Murder, arose
from the six-part
TV documentary series that he wrote, presented and co-produced for
Channel 5. He
has given advice to many major police enquiries and expert evidence in
court
cases and to government inquiries.
Email: dcanter@liverpool.ac.uk
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REFERENCE
Canter, D. V.
(2007). Doing psychology that counts: George Kelly's influence. Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 3, 27-38.
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp07/canter07.html)
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Received: 4 December 2006 – Accepted: 10 December
2006 –
Published: 31 January 2007
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