More On Selecting Elements

Offered element sets

This is the term for when you as the interviewer determine the element set in advance of the interview, with no input from the interviewee. Use it when you are certain that it is these elements, and these alone, which you want to start the interview. For example, if you were doing market research to see how people construed eight different brands of soap powder, you would use those eight brands as your elements. Or if you were doing separate Grids with all the members of a team about their perceptions of the other team members, then the team members must be the elements for every interview.

The advantage of using offered elements is simply that of control: you as the interviewer determine what the Grid interview will be about. The disadvantage is that your interviewee may not be familiar with some of the elements, and so you need to check that the interviewee does recognise all of them (and perhaps keep a few spare in reserve).

Offer a category

With this strategy, you would name the category into which the elements should fall, but leave it up to the interviewee to name the actual elements: for example ‘Think of eight brands of soap powder,’ or think of the four best managers you know ... and four of the least effective,’ and so on. The advantage of this is that you can be certain that the elements are known to the interviewee, but you might get a slight bias towards those which are more familiar.

Use element creation questions

This strategy has you, the interviewer, prepare a list of questions to which the answers will be the elements: for example ‘Tell me the career you would most prefer ... and one you would never consider ... and your best friend’s career ... and another which is appealing ... and another which you wouldn’t like ...’ etc. There are several advantages in this process: it makes sure that you have a good scatter over the domain you are exploring, you know that the elements are familiar to the interviewee, there’s a stronger feeling of ownership, and if you are doing a project which involves getting Grids from several people then the collated answers to the element questions are themselves informative. The price you pay is that this kind of element set takes longer to elicit, but in many applications of Grid it’s worth it.

Make sure you cover both sides of the boundary

Whatever strategy you use, if you are using Grid to help define a boundary then you need to have elements from both sides of the boundary. In other words, if you are using Grid to uncover how the interviewee perceives the characteristics of good team members, then you must have in your elements some good team members and some not-so-good, otherwise you won’t get the contrast. If you want to help someone explore occasions when they have successfully been assertive, you need in the element set some occasions which were successful and some which weren’t.

You can mix strategies

You can of course use a mixture of strategies. You might use element creation questions to begin with, and then supply some elements yourself if you want to be sure that those elements are included. In that case, it’s probably best to begin with the element creation questions because you will then know whether a given element is there as a response to a particular question.

And remember: elements should be concrete, discrete, and homogenous.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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