Same roots different branches: the study of personality by researchers from different disciplines

Abstract

Increasing specialisation in most academic fields has led to the compartmentalisation of knowledge into highly specific fields of enquiry. As a result, researchers working in different but related fields rarely get the opportunity to collaborate and pool their knowledge. This situation is particularly problematic in the social sciences, given that the complexity of human experience usually necessitates the approach of a situation from multiple complementary angles. The current study is the result of a collaborative exercise between an organisational psychologist, specialising in the study of human behaviour at the workplace, and a clinical psychologist, specialising in the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders and behavioural and emotional difficulties. This paper addresses the common underlying epistemological and ontological frameworks that both authors subscribe to, which give rise to similar viewpoints on phenomena. It subsequently describes how these two researchers approach the study of personality by adopting a methodology that embraces both idiographic and nomothetic approaches. It also explores how the authors have examined the perceptions of specific professionals, namely clinical and counselling psychologists, from the perspectives of organisational and clinical psychology. The instrument used as a means of data-collection for this study, the repertory grid, is also described. Subsequently findings emerging from the data collected using this technique are presented and discussed in the light of the theories reviewed. The data collected using this technique, based on a social constructivist philosophy, also lends itself to quantitative analysis, bridging the divide between idiographic and nomothetic research methods.