The Importance of Piloting Repertory Grid Interview Sessions

 

Why Should you Pilot?

The question may seem so obvious as to be patronising. But we mustn’t forget that Grid is a powerful but content-free procedure for having a structured conversation, for a particular purpose, and with many different options for analysis. Unlike some other procedures, a Grid interview will always give you data. So if you’ve not set it up correctly, you may only learn that distressing fact when you try to make some sense of what you’ve got; at which point you may be under time pressure to complete a thesis, or you’ve made implicit or explicit promises to clients or patients and the delay may be damaging to you and/or them.

If you don’t pilot, you won’t be in a position to give (or get) feedback from your clients which could put you back on track should you be alert for the signals. I’m often surprised at the number of Grid projects which are planned without considering the importance of feedback – not just feedback at the end of the process, but feedback included as an integral part of the process. This is why I lose no opportunity to point out that Grid is a conversation. Often it is a conversation in which the journey is more important than the arrival (i.e. a final statistical analysis). This is why we designed Enquire Within^® so that feedback is integral to the process of developing the cognitive map.

So, if you don’t pilot, the worst-case scenario is that you have a furniture van full of data which will not meet the purpose, plus people leaning on you for the results you’ve promised them, plus a general question ‘How do I analyse this?’ which is unanswerable. Unanswerable not merely because there are so many different analysis techniques available but because the choice of analysis method should have been settled at the start. You wouldn’t start to collect market survey data, or ask questions of a job applicant, or enter a set of figures into your calculator, without knowing what you wanted the results to tell you.

How Do You Pilot?

A pilot begins, like all good science, by your framing the question that you want the Grid to answer – in other words, what hypothesis do you want to test? Stating this clearly means that you will always have a point of reference for the goodness of your pilot.

Then you pilot your resources: that is, your elements or element creation questions, the purpose for this particular Grid (which may not be the same as your general hypothesis but will be linked to it), and the qualifiers you will use.

Elements/element creation questions:

• Do they give adequate cover of the domain you want to explore? If you are exploring a border (e.g. what’s the difference between recruits who leave and those who stay) you need as elements both kinds of recruit.
• Are the elements concrete and specific enough – especially if they are events or activities?
• Will the interviewee understand them and relate to them?
• Have you got enough (six is a bare minimum, I usually recommend nine).
• Have you got too many – it’s unlikely, but it’s been known to happen.
• Do they all feel as if they ‘belong’ to the purpose?

Purpose of the particular Grid:

In other words, what do you want from this particular interviewee? If your overall hypothesis is: ‘Women bank managers understand their customers’ needs better than male bank managers’, then you’ll probably be interviewing a selection of man and women bank managers and your purpose for that interview will probably be something like ‘In order to explore my understanding of my customers’ needs.’

Qualifiers:

These are the ‘...in terms of’ questions which modify the basic construct elicitation question and direct the interview towards your purpose. So to continue the example with bank managers, you’ll probably have a qualifier like ‘... in terms of what they want from the bank,’ but you won’t want one like ‘.... in terms of their family life.’

Resources:

The elements, element creation questions, purpose and qualifiers are the basic building blocks. Experienced Gridders can usually think of these and try them out in their head to see whether they meet the purpose, but they will go all the way through asking themselves two or three construct elicitation questions: ‘That feels about right,’ won’t do.

Session Practice

However, until you are entirely confident, you’ll need someone who will let you practise your session with them, and that means:

Introduction:

What will you say to introduce the session? How will you form a good ‘contract’ with the interviewee so that he or she is alert and interested and takes your purpose on board? What will you say about what happens to the data, and when the interviewee can expect to see or discuss or work with the final results? Lots of Grid interviews fall over at this point, simply because one hasn’t thought of how to introduce this rather strange process and how the interviewee will be feeling about it.

Feedback:

In your pilot interviews, be alert for the best times to give (and receive) feedback. You might prefer to think of feedback as stopping part-way through the session and summarising what you’ve learned so far in order to choose where to go next. But if you give no feedback at all during the session, so that it just seems like an exercise in producing constructs and rating them, the least that will happen is that your interviewee gets bored. The worst is that you could miss some valuable signals about the content or the process.

Timing:

The pilot interviews are the time to learn how long it will take to do a Grid that meets your purpose – and indeed whether you need just one session, or whether it will go better with two or three and time for reflection in between. If you have externally-imposed time constraints, this is the moment to think about how you can adapt the process so as to get the best value out of the limited time. All sorts of adaptations are possible, and you will find some of the other hints useful here.

Analysis:

When you’ve got the data from the pilot interviews, and you haven’t already chosen your analysis methodology (Enquire Within^® builds it in automatically, but many other grid software programs don’t) then your final step is to pilot your analysis and see whether:

1. it enables you to answer your hypothesis, and
2. enables you to answer any promises you may have made to clients about timing, format, etc.

Then the rest of the project should be relatively trouble-free.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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