Designing a Repertory Grid Session

 

Let me begin this hint by saying that there are lots of cross-references to other hints on this site, because some of the issues – such as choosing an element set, and methods of analysis – are treated in greater detail there.

The Assignment

Suppose that you’re studying Modern American History and your tutor sets you an assignment: ‘Discuss the factors which characterise the most effective Presidents of the 20th century.’ How will you set about the task?

Obviously your first task is to assemble a list of the 20th century Presidents. You may ask yourself whether you should start your project by considering all of them, or whether you would find it easier to start with a selection – in which case you will want to make sure that your sample includes the extremes, and maybe some about whom opinions differ. While you are doing this, another part of your brain is probably asking questions like ‘Effective in whose eyes? What about those where history has changed how they are evaluated? Isn’t effectiveness dependent to some extent on the situations they had to confront? How do we define effectiveness anyway? Is it my opinion which the tutor wants, or should I do a literature search as well?’

What you are doing with this internal dialogue is only a very short step away from designing a Repertory Grid session. Grid is simply a way of formalising this quest and then playing back your perceptions so that you can see how much ground you have covered, what patterns have emerged and whether you are content with them, and encouraging you to be thorough.

Configuring the Session

So how would you configure the session? The building blocks of any Repertory Grid session are: the purpose, the elements, and the qualifying questions. The purpose is a statement of why you are doing the interview; the elements are concrete examples of the domain you want to explore; and the qualifying questions direct you to thinking about the elements in a way which is relevant to the purpose. In this case, your purpose statement would be something like ‘To explore my perceptions of 20th Century American Presidents’. Your elements would be a selection of Presidents, chosen according to the sampling method outlined in the third paragraph above.

In choosing the qualifying questions you need to strike a balance between the general and the specific – for example, I quoted from the internal dialogue you might have started, thus: ‘Effective in whose eyes? What about those where history has changed how they are evaluated? Isn’t effectiveness dependent to some extent on the situations they had to confront? How do we define effectiveness anyway? Is it my opinion which the tutor wants, or should I do a literature search as well?’ This internal dialogue is prompting some qualifiers and some constructs. A good rule of thumb is that you should make your qualifying questions fairly general, because you’ll probably need only three or four. So you might have: ‘In terms of their personal attributes ......, In terms of the situations they faced ......, and ‘In terms of public opinion......’.

Then you’re ready to take the elements in groups of three and ask yourself ‘In what way are any two of these Presidents similar to each other and different from the third?’ and you’re into construct elicitation.

A Note on Qualifiers

The qualifiers direct the interviewee to think about the elements in ways that are relevant to the purpose. They can be very important at the start of the interview, because they set the scene, but mostly they fade out of the discussion once the interviewee has hit their stride. A couple of examples may clarify:

• An interviewer who was using Grid for career counselling reported that she had difficulties getting ‘personal’ constructs (her words) from her interviewees, using careers as elements. The constructs were mostly what’s called ‘propositional’ – that is, constructs which described objective properties of the elements, such as regular hours - irregular hours, large firm - small firm – and she wanted her clients to express their feelings as a first step in counselling. The suggestion was that she ask the clients to think about the jobs ‘in terms of the skills they’d need, in terms of how I feel about them, in terms of what it would be like to work there ....’ and hey presto! she started to get ‘personal’ constructs.

• One application of Grid is for mentoring newly-qualified teachers. The elements used are the children in the class. The first two qualifiers are ‘In terms of how they behave in class,’ and ‘In terms of their home and family circumstances.’ However, the third qualifier is ‘In terms of how I behave towards them,’ which radically changes the interviewee’s viewpoint - but in a way which will enable a discussion of how the teacher’s behaviour influences the children’s, and vice versa.

So the qualifiers can be really useful at the beginning of the session, to steer the interviewee in the general direction of the purpose; but after a while you might not need them if the interview has become self-managing. It’s very rarely the case that you need to record which construct goes with which qualifier.

The point of this note on qualifiers is to say three things:

• you need them at the start;
• as long as they’re in the right area, don’t agonise about the wording, and
• if all goes well, you’ll forget them as the interview progresses.

Analysis

Back now to the session on American Presidents. The purpose, elements, and qualifiers suggested themselves easily. But – how are you going to analyse it? Given your assigned task of discussing the factors which characterise the most effective Presidents of the 20th century, the essence of your quest could be summarised as: ‘List those constructs which are most closely associated with the construct effective - less effective.’ Of course, you will also want to group the Presidents themselves in terms of their effectiveness. There are other refinements which you could apply, but the basic question is to explore the constructs associated with effectiveness.

This means that you will need to put your matrix of elements rated on constructs through a statistical analysis. Statistical analyses of Grid data fall into two camps: multivariate analysis and dendritic analysis. There is no point in trying to conceal our partiality for dendritic analysis, but each approach has its adherents. A multivariate analysis manipulates the matrix of elements and constructs so that the relationships between them can be plotted on a two- or three-dimensional chart. A dendritic analysis calculates which two elements are most closely correlated, places them next to each other in the matrix and makes them into a ‘virtual’ element, and goes on doing that until all the elements are shown grouped in ‘families’ according to their degree of correlation; and then it does the same thing for the constructs. We are committed to the dendritic analysis approach because it does not lose any of the information – as is inevitable with a multivariate analysis – and because the presentation of the analysis makes it easy to go on growing the Grid by looking for the areas where more clarity is needed.

However, the detailed exposition of analyses can be found elsewhere. What’s important in this session on American Presidents is that before you start the process, you know what you want the analysis to tell you – in this case, which constructs are correlated with effectiveness, and how many types of President do we seem to have – and make sure that your method will support these questions. It is simply no good waiting until later and asking ‘How do I analyse this Grid?’ because the answer you’ll get is ‘What do you want the analysis to tell you?’

Continuing the Session Development

The example using American Presidents may have looked obvious, but with a little practice and feedback you should find it easy also. For more detail, read the hints on elements (Hints on Choosing Elements, and More on Choosing Elements, Using Ideal Elements) and on analysis (Where’s the beef? and the three Sweet and Simple examples). The rest of this hint is not concerned with the details, but with the overall planning of a Grid study.

There are two questions that you should ask yourself before planning a Grid session. The first is: where does the project fall on the construct extractive - reflective, and the second is: where do we expect to find the gems?

Where does the project fall on the construct extractive - reflective?

Some Grid interviews are for you as a researcher to suck information out of your interviewee: market research, for example, some approaches to developing management competences, etc. These are ‘extractive’ interviews. In other interviews - counselling, conflict resolution, helping someone draw up a person specification - you are there to serve the purposes of someone who has asked for your help. These are ‘reflective’ interviews.

Knowing where you stand on this scale is helpful. For example, if you were planning a project which would involve ‘extractive’ interviews with a large number of interviewees, you might invoke the 80/20 rule and put a time limit on each interview; whereas when you’re doing someone a service you are there until they no longer need you, but you may be committed to a series of visits with time for reflection in between. Again, in an ‘extractive’ interview you have rather more licence to get the interviewee to keep to the point (politely, of course, and first having listened for whether what’s said is useful); in a ‘reflective’ interview you are more likely to follow the interviewee’s lead.

Both kinds of interview - in fact all kinds of interview - demand feedback, of course.

Where do we expect to find the gems?

Knowing or guessing the answer to this question is a great help when deciding what form of analysis you should consider. By ‘the gems’ I mean those parts of the interview where you expect to discover the information which is relevant to your purpose. These could range from a simple frequency count of the number of elements, or constructs; content analysis of elements or constructs; analysing how just a few elements or constructs are used (for example, in the session about American Presidents your first priority is to examine the constructs which are closely correlated with the construct effective - less effective, though you may go on to examine others); looking at the whole picture; seeing what happens when you introduce a new element or construct, or delete an existing one; and so on. Knowing where and how to look for the useful information will guide your choice of analysis.

Some final points to bear in mind

• Pilot your interview design (including analysis) before committing to it.
• Bear in mind that there may be two or three different configurations which will achieve the same purpose.
• The most common mistake which new Grid interviewers make is to have the elements too abstract. You will hardly ever go wrong by making your elements more concrete.
• Remember that Grid lets you see the interviewee’s world as the interviewee has learned to understand it. Even if the interviewee has asked for counselling (i.e. asked your help in re-framing their world), much of it has worked for them until now. Don’t judge it - listen to it, understand it, be a skilled mirror before anything else.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

Skills for an Effective Rep Grid Interviewer

• Understanding George Kelly and Personal Construct Theory
• Designing a Session
• Learning the Repertory Grid Interview Process
• Construct Analysis
• Feedback
• Reminders, Tips and Wrinkles

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Related Resources

• Theory of Personal Constructs
• Background and Theory
• Kelly's Concerns
• Tutorials
• Some Resources for Understanding the Repertory Grid Interview
• Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia - Repertory Grid
• ATHERTON J S (2005) Learning and Teaching: Personal Construct Theory

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• Psychology of Personal Constructs
• Manual for Repertory Grid Technique
• Recent Advances in Personal Construct Technology (Computers and people series)