RESEARCH: Construct Validation

Research and Topic Ideas from William Glasser Institute, Ireland

RESEARCH: Construct Validation

  • Internal Control of Human Behaviour
    • What evidence can we offer that Human Behaviour is controlled from within the person rather than by external stimuli. The research by Albert Bandura on self-efficacy may provide useful material.
  • The existence of Five Basic Needs
    • Can evidence be offered, preferably with a strong cross-cultural dimension, that Glasser’s five basic needs are the ultimate driving forces of our behaviour? Dr. Jesús Miranda Páez has laid excellent groundwork for this approach using factor analysis.
    • Is there a direct relationship between deficiencies in need satisfaction and behaviour? Does a person choose behaviours that restore equilibrium in the needs?
    • Do different individuals have different needs intensities? If such differences exist are they genetic or learned?
    • Does a person’s Needs Intensities profile give some indication of how that person might interact with others? How do people with different needs intensities interact?
  • Trans-cultural and language comparisons of the Total Knowledge Filter
    • What part does the classification or identification of external stimuli play in our perceptual systems? There are cultural differences in the use of language (for example, “green” in English does not refer to the same sample of the colour spectrum as “verde” in Spanish). Social Psychology will provide lots of useful material around these issues.
  • Phenomenology: the role of Perceptions in Human Behaviour
    • George Kelly of Construct Theory once said that nobody ever responded to a stimulus but to their perception of a stimulus. The crucial intermediary role of perception and indeed the very nature of “reality” itself give ample scope for research.
  • The Values Filter and Perceptual Set
    • Perceptual set is well researched in Psychology but the links between the Values Filter and the Quality World give scope for new research in the context of Choice Theory.
  • Cultural influences on the Values Filter
    • Hand-in-hand with the cultural differences in the Quality World go differences in the values filter.
  • Cultural influences on the Quality World
    • This area of research could also include sub-cultures such as different religious groups.
  • The Relationship between Quality World and Behaviour
    • How do the images that a person accumulates in his/her Quality World reflect in that person’s behaviour?
  • The origins of the Quality World
    • Where and when do the “pictures” in the Quality World come from? Are specific parts of the Quality World formed at special critical phases of development? Related areas that may merit more specialized research are “obsessions”, fanatacism, fundamentalism and any form of “hero worship”.
  • Organized Behaviour
    • Do people have special “databases” or vocabularies of behaviours that they call on when problem-solving or decision-making?
  • Reorganizing Behaviours
    • Can we show that people dip into their creativity when their Organized Behaviours do not have solutions for new problems?
  • Total Behaviour: the totality of acting, thinking, feeling and physiology
    • Do these four components really work together in an inseparable way? Does changing any one of them effectively change the others? (Biofeedback methodology may provide valuable data here.)
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