Kelly's Concerns
Kelly saw that current theories of personality were so loosely defined and difficult to test that in many clinical cases the observer contributed more to the diagnosis than the patient. If you took your problems to a Freudian analyst, they would be analysed in Freudian terms; a Jungian would interpret them in Jungian terms; a behaviourist would interpret them in terms of conditioning; and so on.
The problem of observer bias (observer effect) is particularly acute in the social sciences such as psychology, sociology, economics, etc., where commentators' frame of reference can influence what they see, how they describe it, and what they prescribe. You can find explanations of schizophrenia which rely on brain chemistry at one end of the spectrum and family dynamics at the other. Some educationalists advocate mainstreaming of bright children; some are totally against it. Some economists see government spending as a strategy to be used, and some see it as a strategy to be avoided. It's rare for them to find common ground.
Kelly wanted to develop a theory and an investigative technique, which would remove the influence of the observer's frame of reference on what was observed.
Read more about this topic: George Kelly (psychologist)
Famous quotes containing the word concerns:
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)