Personal construct psychology and the research interview: the example of mental toughness in sport.

Abstract

Personal construct psychology (PCP; Kelly, 1955/1991) offers researchers and practitioners several useful methodologies for eliciting the personal constructs of individuals. However, there has been a tendency in the PCP literature to become reliant on traditional construct elicitation procedures such as triadic and dyadic sorting as well as laddering interviews. The power of PCP in guiding the design of a retrospective interview protocol for research purposes, in particular, has not featured strongly. We address this issue in this paper by describing a case example of how we have employed PCP to design an interview protocol for examining the phenomenon of mental toughness in sport. Evidence demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed methodology is described and suggestions for future research are offered.