UNED Constructivist Research Group

Exploring the world of meanings Mapping the mind Generating change scenarios

What do we do?

The Constructivist Research Group of the UNED (GICUNED) has been developing its research work in the exploration of the world of personal meanings of individuals, with specific actions in the exploration of the cognitive structure of clinical and non-clinical subjects, studies on cognitive complexity, as well as the exploration of meanings related to specific health problems, such as the acquisition of healthy habits, meanings associated with the implementation of breastfeeding, assessment and attribution of meanings of the different parts of the body in mastectomized women, etc., and their application for psychotherapeutic work.

For the exploration of the world of meanings we use both the Repertory Grid Technique and narrative techniques.

The group has developed specific protocols for the use of the Repertory Grid Technique to generate homogeneous samples for analysis, as well as tools to evaluate the quality of the data obtained and tools to explore the change in personal meanings over time and detection of atypical changes. We have a database of more than 12.000 interviews.

About our team

The members of GICUNED are expert doctors in the study of the construction of personal meaning systems or doctoral students who are doing their doctoral theses on it, the vast majority. One of the strengths of this work team is its multidisciplinary nature. We have members who apart from psychologists are engineers, which helps in planning and developing software for our research purposes. In addition, from applied or health disciplines we have a medical doctor and a nurse on the team, as well as clinical psychologists who help us in testing the models of mental representation that we develop, with clinical patients both in a public hospital context, as well as private clinician.

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