Self-characterization in a child’s drawing AN ILLUSTRATION OF SELF-CHARACTERIZATION IN A CHILD'S DRAWING: THE IMPORTANCE OF PROCESS

The nature of personal construct theory seems especially suited to research with children, since it is essentially a forward-looking theory that emphasizes change, and all children change as they grow up (Hayhow, Lansdown, Maddick & Ravenette, 1988, p.199). Yet there is relatively little research with children in Personal Construct Psychology. (The bibliography of Chiari (1990) lists only 45 references to childhood in a total of around 1700. Why this is so is hard to say, however it may well be partly that the traditional methods of enquiry in personal construct psychology are not well suited to work with children. In fact a variety of PCP techniques have been used in both research and clinical applications with children. This has included: a form of self characterization (Jackson, 1988; Jackson & Bannister, 1985); responses to set questions (Bannister & Agnew, 1976); a board game variant of the grid (Jones, 1997); a range of drawing techniques (Ravenette, 1977, 1999, 2003); and of course the ubiquitous repertory grid (Applebee, 1976; Baxter, Jack, & Schröder, 1998; Edwards, 1988; and Salmon,1976). This range of techniques is surprising, considering the general picture of dominance of grid methods (see for example Figure 1 of Neimeyer, 1985 p. 146) in personal construct research. In this paper we wish to focus on the issue of process in personal construct inquiry. In doing so we hope to show some previous initiatives; i.e., Jackson and Bannister's (1985) work with self characterization, and a drawing approach, somewhat different to that of Ravenette (1977, 1999, 2003), can be combined to provide a method of personal construct inquiry appropriate for children. In doing so, we propose to apply Kelly's formal rules of self-characterization to a drawing and show how the process of constructing the drawing contains useful information in itself.