A Common Mistake and How to Avoid It

Throughout the various hints and manuals I’ve tried to stress a simple message – that you’ll never go wrong by making your elements more concrete. But it’s an easy trap to fall into, especially but not exclusively if you are using non-discrete elements, or an element set which is events or activities.

A Real Life Example

Let me give an example which is an amalgam of some real-life situations which we’ve been asked about. Suppose that you decided to explore how a child coped with the treatment for his lazy eye. (One of my brothers had this – they began by giving him an occluded lens over the good one, but then discovered that he was peeking round the corners, and so the poor soul had to have a sticky plaster completely covering the good eye, for several months). The temptation is to design an element set along the lines of:

But in fact each of these ‘elements’ is one pole of a construct, and in my brother’s case the constructs would probably be:

Recognising and Solving the Problem

If you tried to use the first list as elements, you’d soon start to feel that something was going wrong when you began to elicit constructs. You’d probably get very few constructs and most of them would be propositional or simple evaluative ones such as ‘I felt OK – I felt miserable’. You’d feel that you were missing something, going round in circles; that there was more detail, and more in-depth analysis, available but somehow you’d be missing it. Your interviewee would give off signals of discontent. What’s happened is that you’ve used as elements statements which are really one pole of a construct, and you need to drop everything down a level. A much better element set might be:

A possible source of confusion is that in order to get this element set you’d have had to talk to my kid brother, and probably had to construct a set of element creation questions, such as:

Both you and the interviewee will have to work to ensure that the resulting elements are real, observable, time-bound events. (This is why working with an event/activity element set is more difficult – beginners should start with elements which hurt when you drop them on your foot). The trick is to see if you can make yourself ‘hear’ a contrast to the actual element you’re using, and if you can, then you’re probably using half a construct.

Another way you can fall into this hole is by using very abstract elements – for example, if you embarked on a project to explore the skills needed by young doctors and you had DIAGNOSTIC SKILLS, BEDSIDE MANNER, PHARMACOLOGY, STAMINA, and so on. Each of these reduces (at least) to Good diagnostic skills – Poor diagnostic skills, etc. – in other words, your ‘elements’ should really turn up as constructs.

I’m sorry to make such a meal of this – it sounds so terribly complicated that it might put you off Grid forever. It isn’t really, because with the right advice it’s a mistake that you’ll only make once, or maybe never. This hint will pull you out of a mire than many novices get into and may have trouble seeing their way out of. By the way, the advice to pilot any design in your head or on a trusted friend should help.

If it helps, think of a Grid project as like a surveyor setting out to map a new territory. The first thing they’ll do is select some points on the territory – a church, a hilltop, a farm, a bend in the river – and then they’ll start to describe how they relate to one another. The sharper their starting points, the more complex a description they’ll be able to make. Elements are the starting points, and the constructs are the various descriptors.

In summary – you will never go wrong by making your elements more concrete. And if you’re a complete novice, do your first practices using physical objects as elements so that you get a sense of moving through the range and subtlety of the constructs you elicit.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

See also Hints in Choosing Elements for the Repertory Grid Interview

Search this Site

---

Suggestions

• Download a free evaluation copy of Enquire Within here
• Email this page to a colleague.
• Post this page to: del.icio.us
• Want to know more? Join the experts at the RepGrid User Group.
• Want to keep in touch? Join our mailing list.
• A detailed log of developments at Enquire Within is at http://twitter.com/EnquireWithin. Join us there.
• Translate this page to your language? Try Google Toolbar.

Back to Hints Index