Theoretical Perspective: Constructivism

Introduction

An assessment strategy might be classified as constructivist to the extent that it (a) elucidates ‘local’, as opposed to ‘universal’, meanings and practices in individuals or social groups, (b) focuses upon ‘provisional’, rather than ‘essential’, and unchanging patterns of meaning construction, (c) considers knowledge to be the production of social and personal processes of meaning-making, and (d) is more concerned with the viability or pragmatic utility of its application, than with its validity, per se (Popkinghorne, 1992). This emphasis on local, provisional, and pragmatic assessment of (inter) personal meanings can be illustrated by a closer consideration of two core techniques associated with a constructivist approach, each of which encompasses many different variations. These include repertory grid technique, which focuses on the content and structure of people's construct systems, and the analysis of personal narratives in spoken or written ‘text’, which reveals the changing processes by which people create meaningful stories of their experience.

Repertory Grid Technique

Developed within personal construct theory, repertory grid technique represents a widely used method for studying personal and interpersonal systems of meaning. Because of their flexibility, repertory grids (or repgrids) have been used in literally thousands of studies of a broad variety of topics, ranging from the shared perceptions that constitute an organization's unique ‘culture’ to the naive understandings of school children about physical science concepts (Fransella and Bannister, 1977). However, the most common application of grids has been in the clinical area, where they have been used to study such issues as the body images of women struggling with eating disorders and attitudes toward alternative careers held by clients in vocational counselling.

The ‘reptest’ was initially designed by George Kelly (1955), the author of personal construct theory, as a means of assessing the content and structure of an individual's repertory of role constructs – the unique system of interconnected meanings that define his or her perceived relationships to others. In its most common form, the reptest requires the respondent to compare and contrast successive sets of three significant people (e.g. my spouse, my father, and myself), and formulate some important way in which two of the figures are alike, and different from the third. For example, if prompted with the above triad, a person might respond, ‘Well, my father and husband tend to be very conventional people, whereas I'm more rebellious.’ This basic dimension, conventional vs. rebellious, would then be considered one of the significant themes or constructs that the person uses to organize, interpret, and approach the social world, and to define his or her role in it. By presenting the respondent with a large number of clinically significant ‘elements’ (e.g. a previous romantic partner, best friend, a disliked person, one's ideal self), the reptest elicits a broad sampling of the personal constructs that constitute the person's outlook on life and perceived alternatives. These constructs can then be interpreted clinically, used as the basis for further interviewing of the respondent, or coded using any of a number of reliable systems of content analysis, conducted either manually or with available computer programs (Neimeyer, 1993).

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