---
title: "Kelly Research at Sewanee University"
url: https://alsuprun.com/blog/kelly-research-technologies/kelly-research-at-sewanee-university/
author: "Editorial"
date: 2026-09-27T17:28:20+00:00
categories: ["kelly research technologies"]
tags: []
---

# Kelly Research at Sewanee University

Kelly’s research focuses on the history of education and youth culture. She teaches two courses at Sewanee that grow out of her scholarship.

 Dr. John Kelly led the most rigorous scientific study to date of Alcoholics Anonymous. He and co-author Keith Humphreys explain key study results and implications.

 

## GEORGE A. KELLY BIBLIOGRAPHY

 George Kelly was born near Perth, Kansas in 1905 and homeschooled by his parents until he was 16. He studied physics and mathematics at Park College in Kansas and obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1926. He also earned a master’s degree in educational sociology at the University of Kansas and another at Edinburgh University in Scotland. He was drawn to psychology and received his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1931, teaching physiological psychology at Fort Hays Kansas State College.

 [![Rejuvenate your whole body & balance your health without medications - now remotely!](https://alsuprun.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/BioresonanceTopAd.png)](https://www.bioresonance.rent) While he enjoyed teaching and developing the theory of personal constructs, he wanted to do something more humanitarian with his life. In order to do this, he began to offer free clinical services to rural families. His clients were often dirt poor, and it wasn’t easy for him to make a living doing this. However, he found that these people were eager to learn. He was able to help them improve their lives.

 Initially, he tried to use the standard Freudian training he had received during his graduate studies. He had them lie on a couch and tell him about their dreams and resistances. But he quickly discovered that the standard explanations he offered didn’t seem very valid to these farm families. They didn’t fit their culture or experiences. So, he started “making up” explanations for them instead.

 This led him to a different view of personality. He felt that a person’s personality was a system of construals, or interpretations, about their social environment. Rather than being determined by sexual or aggressive drives or learning history, it was developed by the person’s need to categorize and predict events in their environment. If a person’s construal system became disordered, they would have trouble predicting or accommodating new information.

 [![](https://alsuprun.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/ForeverYoungYouWannaBe.png)](https://alsuprun.com/services.html#Contact) He called this perspective constructive alternativism. He believed that every person has a unique construction of reality, and that while some interpretations are better than others, none is completely inaccurate.

 When he published his theory in 1955, Kelly generated quite a bit of interest. However, the field of psychology was still rather stuck in a behaviorist approach, and Kelly didn’t get much support from the “scientific” branch of the profession.

 He did, however, develop a strong following among industrial psychologists, and was able to keep his theory alive. Despite this, it is still only in recent years that the concept of personal constructs has become widely accepted within psychology. Some of the words he coined, like anticipation and construal, are now part of common vocabulary; but others have not yet made it into the mainstream. Nevertheless, Kelly was an important innovator in the field of psychology. He just didn’t get the recognition that he deserved.

 

## GEORGE A. KELLY WORKS

 George Kelly was a man of many interests and talents. He was a historian, educator, psychologist, and writer. His contribution to the development of personal construct psychology was substantial and important. He had an uncanny ability to describe human experience and how people become who they are.

 Kelly’s work during the depression at Fort Hays Kansas State College focused on developing clinical psychological services in rural areas. He developed traveling clinics and a model for training clinical psychologists that had a significant impact on the future of clinical psychology in rural schools. He also made a significant contribution to the advancement of psychotherapy theory and practice.

 He was a strong critic of the standard Freudian explanations that were being used in therapy at the time. He felt that these were often far-fetched and did not fit the realities of the lives of people living on a Kansas farm. He began to make up his own explanations that he thought might be more apt to explain the experiences of people in therapy.

 [![](https://alsuprun.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/RadionicMerch.png)](https://alsuprun.com/merch.html) Although his work on personal construct theory was not widely accepted in the early part of this century, it did have an influence on later developments. In particular, it provided a useful alternative to psychodynamic theories and behavioral theories. It also served as a valuable precursor to the cognitive therapies that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s.

 The key concept in Kelly’s theory was that a person’s life and the things that happen to them are determined by the way they construe reality and how they try to anticipate the world around them. This is a view that is quite different from the standard behaviorist view that people are primarily motivated by their instincts (like sexual and aggressive drives) or by learned behaviors.

 For a phenomenologist, this view of the world is very congenial. In fact, it is the fundamental principle of phenomenology. It is very similar to the view that people are scientists who essentially test their theories of reality by the ways they interact with it and the way they behave in response to it. The only difference is that Kelly’s view of reality includes not just the world out there but also how a person understands and perceives it from moment to moment, day to day, and year to year. This is the essence of his theory.

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