ABSTRACT
Kelly's theory has commanded rather less attention than the techniques derived from it for the exploration of an individual's construing. These techniques, and in particular the repertory grid, may appear as welcome, concrete lifelines which are clutched at before their relationship to the parent theory is fully understood or which are employed without reference to the theory. Thus, repertory grid technique can be, and has been, used to test hypotheses derived from theories other than Kelly's, to measure personality traits, and to explore general semantic dimensions rather than personal constructs. Although such applications indicate something of the flexibility of the technique, Fransella and Bannister (1977, p. 104) note that ‘the practical difficulties and dangers in grid method … derive from the historical tendency to divorce grid methodology from personal construct theory’. Also of concern to personal construct theorists has been the extent of the reliance on repertory grid technique in empirical work based on the theory, \R. Neimeyer (1985b) having found that over 96 per cent of empirical studies published by personal construct theorists over a twenty-seven-year period employed the grid as their main measure. As he states, ‘This degree of methodological constriction is remarkable and may be paralleled in the history of psychology only by Skinnerian behaviorism's reliance on the operant conditioning chamber and psychoanalysis's confidence in the “psychoanalytic method” as research paradigms that pre-empt all others’ (p. 116).
