It’s the Way I Tell Them. A Personal Construct Psychology Method for Analysing Narratives

Abstract

Qualitative research methods aim to produce some form of narrative for analysis and many alternative forms of narrative analysis exist, mostly informed by social constructionist perspectives. This creates a dilemma for personal constructivist researchers, who now have access to a plethora of methods for understanding and intervening in people’s sensemaking processes but are faced with a distinct absence of a uniquely personal constructivist method for analyzing the emerging narratives. This paper aims to outline a Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) (Kelly, 1955) view of the person as an agentic being and provide a contextualized, step by step guide for analyzing personal narratives from a Kellian perspective that encompasses identification and analysis of constructs, metaphors, roles, implicit beliefs and emotions. Kelly advocated working with the ‘whole’ person by credulously exploring their lived reality through the entirety of their emotions, cognitions and behaviors, which goes beyond an extraction of narrative themes or phenomenological interpretations contained in the realm of the person’s known world. In PCP, language is regarded as symbolic, contextual, performative, and incomplete but, unlike social constructionist approaches, the focus favors the identification and explanation of internal identity processes, social cognitions, and personal meanings, rather than how language is utilized externally as a cultural tool. By articulating an explicit process, we aim to improve the accessibility of PCP as a full research process and overcome the current limitations posed by utilizing qualitative analytical methods drawn from alternative epistemologies.