Hints in Choosing Elements for the Repertory Grid Interview

 

Elements Must be Concrete and Discrete

The important thing to remember is that elements must be concrete and discrete. Also, your element set should be homogeneous - that is, each element should carry the same ‘weight’, have the same right to be in the element set. However, if you have a non-homogeneous element set you will soon notice it when the interview starts and you can correct yourself. Break the ‘concrete and discrete’ rule, though, and you won’t be able to recover.

Don’t Use One End of a Construct as an Element

For example, someone asked for help with a project intended to clarify the characteristics of effective managers as the interviewee saw them. The element set he was proposing to use was: MOTIVATION, STRESS, COMMUNICATION, LEADERSHIP, RISK, TEAMWORK, PROBLEM-SOLVING, and AMBITION. He was not getting anywhere with this set, as you can see for yourself if you try asking the question ‘What have MOTIVATION and STRESS in common which makes them different from AMBITION?’ I pointed out to him that he had fallen into the trap of using as elements concepts which were really one pole of a set of constructs: low motivation - high motivation, prone to stress - not subject to stress, etc. What he needed to do was to give his interviewee a set of real managers as elements, and then see whether these constructs emerged in the Grid conversation and how the interviewee used them. With the elements he had originally proposed, the interview would have meandered into meaninglessness.

A good element set should hurt when you drop it on your foot; you will never ever go wrong by making your element set more concrete.

A good analogy is to think about how you might write an analytical essay about American presidents. You would probably have some ideas about the dimensions you would want to uncover or explore, but once you started to be systematic in your background research you would have no choice other than to list a sample of presidents and then, as you read about them, make notes on the important characteristics which emerged. And when you start to write your essay, you would have to introduce individual presidents to illustrate your points. A Grid interview is exactly the same: start with concrete representations of the domain you want to explore (your elements), and then use construct elicitation to derive the important dimensions within your field of enquiry.

Elements Mustn’t Overlap or Contain One Another

Another analogy will illustrate the point about the elements being discrete. Suppose that your essay will be about battles. Again, you would start by drawing up a list of battles which give a good spread over your area of interest - begin with concrete examples. Suppose further that one of your battles was the D-Day landing, and another was Omaha Beach - one of the subsidiary battles within the D-Day landing. You’d find that you needed to treat Omaha Beach as a subject on its own, because although it was part of the D-Day landings what happened there was very different from what happened on some of the other invasion beaches. In Grid terms, you’ve got a non-discrete element set: OMAHA BEACH as an element is a subset of D-DAY LANDING as an element. This is a potential problem whenever you use an element set composed of events or activities. The best way to guard against it is to try to be sure that your elements don’t overlap, and perhaps to think about events or activities which are sufficiently bound in time and place that they could be captured on a video clip.

To change the subject-matter, if you were counselling someone with a difficult relationship, then QUARRELLING WITH SYBIL is not as good an element as THE LAST QUARREL WITH SYBIL, and/or THE WORST QUARREL WITH SYBIL, etc. (ENQUIRE WITHIN does contain the facility to correct an overlapping element set during the interview, with no loss of data).

Summary

To summarise: if your Grid interview seems never to get off the ground, you’re getting a lot of generalities which are difficult to refine and/or ladder, your interviewee shows signs of impatience with what feel like meaningless questions - go back and ask yourself whether your element set is truly concrete. Abstract concepts, half-poles of constructs, large-scale events, don’t work. To repeat: an element should hurt when you drop it on your foot.

To repeat: an element should hurt when you drop it on your foot.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

See also More On Selecting Elements
and A Common Mistake and How to Avoid It.

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