ABSTRACT
By type, McQuitty (1957) refers to ‘a category of people or other objects (personal constructs in our example) such that the members are internally selfcontained in being like one another’. Seven constructs were elicited from an infant school teacher who was invited to discuss the ways in which she saw the children in her class. She identified favourable and unfavourable constructs as follows: ‘intelligent’ (+), ‘sociable’ (+), ‘verbally good’ (+), ‘well
behaved’ (+), ‘aggressive’ (–), ‘noisy’ (–) and ‘clumsy’ (–) (see also Cohen, 1977). Four boys and six girls were then selected at random from the class register and the teacher was asked to place each child in rank order under each of the seven constructs, using rank position 1 to indicate the child most like the particular construct, and rank position 10, the child least like the particular construct. The teacher’s rank ordering is set out in Table 37.1. Notice that
on three constructs, the rankings have been reversed in order to maintain the consistency of Favourable = 1, Unfavourable = 10. Table 37.2 sets out the intercorrelations between the seven personal construct ratings shown in Table 37.1 (Spearman’s rho is the method of correlation used in this example). Elementary linkage analysis enables the researcher to cluster together similar groups of variables by hand.
