Our thanks to Marcus Offer for permission to publish his paper below on the use of personal construct theory and the repertory grid interview in career choice and vocational guidance.

Introduction

Personal construct theory was developed originally by George Kelly, an American psychotherapist, who wrote a major work about it in the 1950s. It is constructivist in that it assumes that we cannot know the world and our surroundings except through our own "construing" (= approximately, perception + understanding) of it. This construing takes the form of anticipation (we construe primarily in order to make sense of what will happen) and is bipolar in nature (we perceive mainly differences and similarities between things / people / events / ideas etc. - so constructs of jobs, for example, are of the form "high pay versus low pay”, "office job versus outdoor job", "like what my father does versus like what my mother does" etc. etc.)

Why it is Appropriate to Vocational Guidance

This makes it very appropriate as a theory of career choice and guidance: the basic building blocks of the theory (constructs), the way we see and make sense of the world, present us immediately with choices - a construct is a pathway between at least two alternatives (officially " a way in which two things are similar to each other and different from a third", Kelly, 1955). In addition, constructs are about making sense of experience in order to anticipate the future - so is a guidance interview.

Valuing Individual Experiences

Constructs are organised into hierarchies within the mind. Each person develops her own constructs and links them together in a variety of different ways. You cannot assume that you know what someone means by something they say unless you also know what they do NOT mean by it (i.e. what the opposite pole of that construct is for them) and what it implies for them (what other constructs it simultaneously brings into play). This makes up a personal map, which may be quite different from that of others though it usually shares some common constructs with the public map. Exploration of the personal map is particularly relevant where the person you are trying to understand is from a background dissimilar to your own, from a minority culture or a different social class, for example, or is likely to be disaffected or socially excluded. The “personal map” of the world in the minds of such people is likely to be rather different from the “public map” used by the rest of us.

Playing a Social Role: Making Sense of the Other

In order to play a social role in relation to someone else, Kelly argued, you have to be able to make sense of their construct system, their personal map. You need to be able to put on their glasses and see the world so some extent as it looks in their eyes. That’s a truth we have long expressed in other terms in the guidance community, but here it is spelt out, not just in vague terms like “empathy” or “understanding” but with practical ways of eliciting and assessing the personal maps of others.

In its simplest form, there are ways of conceptualising how we make sense of another's ways of thinking about careers and how we conceive the task of developing them. A useful metaphor is the pyramid. If we imagine constructs arranged in hierarchy, in ascending order of importance and generality in the mind, constructs such as "good versus bad" or "interesting versus boring" may be at higher levels of the pyramid. At the base (in terms of thinking about careers) will be specific job titles such as Motor Mechanic or Nursery Nurse. If someone says, "I want to be a Nursery Nurse", this is probably a statement of a construct at the base of the pyramid. What we need to know is the next level up. Thus, "I want to work with children (as opposed to adults)" might be the construct immediately above "Nursery Nurse (as opposed to Sales Assistant)". Above this might be the construct "I want a job dealing with people (as opposed to things or money)" and above that the construct "Caring (as opposed to selfish)". This "ladder” is something the good interviewer will usually want to go up and down during the interview (a) in order to understand the reasons, values and attitudes behind initial statements the client makes and (b) in order to check the scope of the client's ideas and perhaps to widen them - having gone up as far as the construct "Caring versus selfish" we might wish to draw attention to a range of occupations which could also be construed as “caring” in this sense but which the client may not have thought of - i.e. we descend the pyramid again by another route to different occupational titles such as "doctor" or "teacher in a special school" or "counsellor". At this point the client may object that these are at the wrong end of another important construct for them e.g. "Requires high qualifications (as opposed to lower qualifications)". However, in the process we have moved from a sharply focused position to widen the scope of thinking about occupations, and at the same time we have discovered something else of importance about the client's construct system that must be taken into account by us and which will provide material for further discussion with them. The metaphor of the pyramid has proved useful at times in training guidance practitioners and advisers to interview effectively.

Decision-making

The constructs that are higher up the "pyramid" (and therefore more important and central to the client) are also important when you come to make a decision between two alternatives. For example, if the client in our example is to decide to be something other than a nursery nurse s/he will have to be satisfied that the new career idea does not involve him/her moving from "caring" to "selfish" on the higher construct, otherwise s/he is likely to reject it.

Conflicts can arise which are difficult to resolve because of such higher order (superordinate) implications. It may be necessary to examine afresh whether the construct "caring versus selfish" is the best way of making sense of careers for this person. We may need to develop a new construct where "selfish" does not mean "wanting to get something out of life for myself at others’ expense" etc. etc.. There are many possibilities for in-depth discussion in such situations but without understanding how the client's construct system is arranged, we may misunderstand or be unable to help.

Kelly has a particular model for decision-making - the so-called CPC cycle, which offers an account of why some people may be having difficulty with a decision or with decision-making in general. In the first phase, the perceived issues are elicited, loosely, and are up for grabs as we try to see what is relevant. Gradually some key issues emerge - we begin to see what we have to decide between. At this point, those higher order constructs come into play: I am unwilling to go back to learning perhaps because “learning versus doing” is a construct docked in my mind beneath the higher order construct “subordinate to others/incompetent/ treated like a child” versus “an equal with my mates/competent/ feeling adult”, or I may reject anything that’s actually not a “professional” job, as not worth learning because in my culture only “professional” jobs are worth aspiring to. At least that might be the shape of an individual’s personal map. All constructs are ultimately personal.

Person Centred but Structured

Above all, the PCT approach is person-centred. Each person is seen as his or her own scientist, developing personal and unique hypotheses, which they test in behaviour. Behaviour is an experiment. A person is a form of movement - constantly in change - a good reason for "lifelong learning". All our constructions of people, as of the world, are subject to revision and replacement. This is an antithesis to "trait-and-factor" approaches, which generally ignore the personal map in favour of placing the client on a public map drawn up using other peoples' constructs of personality or work.

At the same time, there are some very powerful structured techniques and exercises available, based on PCT, which can be extremely useful to guidance practitioners - for example the repertory grid (a systematic way of eliciting and mapping a personal construct system often with the use of a computer - see elsewhere on this site), the dependency grid (an exercise to discover the network of resources anyone has available to them in a crisis), " laddering " (exploring the higher order implications of any construct), self characterisation (a loose biographical approach to discovering a person's constructs) and the "ABC technique" (an approach to diagnosing difficulty in decision making situations). This last is particular relevant where the person being helped has problems with change relating to deep-seated habits of mind or social barriers, since it can open up for discussion some of the roots of a problem and challenge effectively without confrontation or judgement. It is highly relevant as a starting point for the long-term unemployed or those trying to break out of addiction, for example.

The Centrality of Change

Because PCT sees individual psychology as naturally in movement, and psychological “health” as the continued elaboration of a personal map of the world, any intervention is essentially to get people moving again when they get stuck. Hence, change is a natural human characteristic, but Kelly and PCT have a lot to say about the “dimensions of transition” - why do some people get stuck, what lies behind the fear and anxiety and threat and guilt that make up so many people's experience of change? Kelly has enlightening analyses of all these elements. For example, he points out that a person whose core constructs (their essential views) of themselves have been based on criminality may actually experience a kind of “guilt” when ceasing to act criminally - dislodged from an idea of themselves they have come to be used to and comfortable with. At the same time, others in their immediate fraternity may experience such a change in them as “aggression” since it forces those others to reconstrue the person in a new light in what may be, for them, uncomfortable and disruptive ways. “Aggression” is defined in a special way by Kelly, as “the active elaboration of a person's construct system” - and hence to some extent as positive, by contrast to the term “hostility” which is the attempt to extort evidence for a view of the situation that clearly no longer works. Hostility may be accompanied by violence just as aggression can, but may also be concealed beneath the “caring” of a parent who doesn’t want their child to grow up, while “aggression” may actually involve no violence to anyone except those who can’t accept change in others they have come to rely on. Nevertheless, “guilt” may be incurred in either case.

This is just a small sample of some of the subtleties of thinking which those who think of PCT as only about the repertory grid may find surprising.

The Social Dimensions

Nor is this purely an individual psychology: personal constructs are clearly fashioned in the interactions between people - Kelly's “cycle of experience” includes the phase of “confirmation/disconfirmation” and, like any scientist, the personal scientist can only develop by putting his or her theories about the world to the test. Personal constructs are largely validated or invalidated by others, and how we deal with invalidation and help other people to deal with it, forms a significant part of Kelly's oeuvre. Dependence on others is fundamental to personal construct theory, and reciprocal dependence a mark of adulthood. One of the tasks of any personal or career adviser with young people will be the attempt to encourage them to “spread their dependencies” so that in any personal crisis situation they have more and wider contacts on which to depend than the rather narrow bases that characterise many socially excluded people. That spread dependence means that invalidation from one source is not the end of the world any more.

Working with Other Professionals and Across Boundaries

The underlying theory and practice can be and have been applied across a range of social practices and organisations, apart from careers work. There is no intellectual break between dealing with drug problems and difficulties in making career choices - the same theory explains both and similar practical approaches are available to deal with both. Change is central to both career development and other transitions so it is easy to communicate across the professional boundaries using a common language wherever the need is helping people to start moving again when they have got stuck, dealing with the fear and anxiety and threat that change can bring with it, understanding the reasons why people get stuck in the first instance. This is particularly relevant where, as in England and some other countries, public career guidance services are particularly tasked with targeting excluded or minority groups not in education, training or employment.

Evaluating and Measuring Change

PCT also offers significant qualitative methods for measuring change over time - among other techniques by the use of the repertory grid, a systematic elicitation of personal constructs which can be analysed by computer to provide pointers to areas of development and change in the structure and content of a personal construct system (the personal map of the world).

Public and Private Maps of the World of Work

There is also a fundamental recognition that individuals and sub-groups will have their own ways of mapping the world, which must be understood and related to before any social role can be played in relation to them. When the public map and formal assessments in society's terms have proved unhelpful, there is always a constructive alternative at the bottom of the PCT tool bag that might just offer that additional helpful insight. As Kelly says: “We assume that all of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision and replacement... We take the stand that there are always some alternative constructions available to choose among in dealing with the world” - for the practitioner and mentor, as well as the client and mentee.

Marcus Offer

About Marcus Offer

Marcus Offer is a former teacher, lecturer and careers adviser with over thirty years experience of careers work including twelve years in the front line advising young people and adults in more than one public careers service in the UK. He has trained others to do the same, both as an in-service training manager, and as a lecturer and tutor on the post-graduate vocational guidance diploma course at Reading University, UK (an initial training course for careers advisers). He is now a freelance writer, researcher, trainer and consultant. He is a member of the UK’s National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling and of the National Association for Educational Guidance for Adults. He can be contacted here:-

Marcus Offer

Related Resources

Suggestions

Search for results from the Enquire Within site.