In the Repertory Grid Interview Where’s the Beef?

 

Quite often, your most useful and insightful information is not in the final Grid analysis; it may happen much earlier.

Some examples:

The language people use for their constructs

For some purposes, all you need to know is the pattern of language people use when describing the elements, and a simple content analysis is all the analysis you need. The classic example of this is using construct elicitation to get people to describe their colleagues at work, as a preliminary to a study of competences or an organisation change intervention. It can be quite enough to know that (for example) 30% of their constructs have to do with knowing the right way to communicate with Head Office, or that 40% have to do with conflict management.

The responses to an unrehearsed element set

If you do a Grid with someone where the elements are ‘situations in my life where I learned something’, or ‘times when I tried to be assertive,’ it’s unlikely that the responses will come tripping off the client’s tongue. You’re asking questions which most people may not formally have asked themselves before. You and they can learn a lot through the process of eliciting them.

Content analysis of constructs over a sample group

We once did a study of why doctors chose the specialties they did, and created the elements by asking for examples of preferred and non-preferred elements. Over the sample of 200, there were significant patterns in the elements themselves. Similarly, when we were asked to help a major retailing firm discover why it lost so many graduates, it was useful to ask which other firms the graduates had applied to.

Analysing how just one or two elements, or constructs, are used

You may be doing a counselling interview where the elements are key relationships. Obviously you use a wide range of relationships in order to elicit the full domain of constructs, but you may find that the bulk of you work can be done by simply comparing MYSELF and MYSELF AS I WOULD LIKE TO BE, or MYSELF AS MY MOTHER WOULD LIKE ME TO BE ... depending on where the agenda of the interview seems to lie.

Exploring a Grid about experience of service in shops, you may find that most of your work can be done by looking at the constructs related to one such as ‘made me decide never to shop there again - not as important as that,’ and looking at the elements which rate highly on the first pole of the construct.

If you are aware of all these choices - and the others which are open to you - then you can plan how to do the interview, how much time to use, how much technology you will need, etc. And always remember that you can do a simple ‘once over lightly’ with a simple protocol which will guide you towards deciding how to plan a larger investigation.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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Related Resource

• A comparison of idiographic and nomothetic studies: Grice, James. (2004) "Bridging the Idiographic Nomothetic Divide in Ratings of Self and Others on the Big Five," Journal of Personality.

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