Feedback in the Repertory Grid Interview

This is the sixth part of a set of hints designed to help people who want to use Repertory Grid but don’t have much experience and/or access to supervision

Some Assumptions

This part makes some assumptions – that you have practised your interviewing technique and can be sure that you are not imposing your own framework on the interviewee; that you have absorbed the twin messages of the importance of planning you analysis from the start, and that Grid is a conversation; and that you don’t need advice on the interpersonal skills needed to be a good listener and counsellor. In that case, there are three golden rules for feedback:

give it;
always relate it to the purpose;
ask for it.

Feedback Principles

In good Grid feedback the principle is for the interviewer to act, as much as possible, as a skilled mirror: that is, to ask questions and give information which will encourage the interviewees to see things for themselves, rather than the interviewer offering an interpretation or judgment. This is why it’s important to be aware of when, and how, you offer your own thoughts. There may be a time when you need to; and there will certainly be a point where you have to make the connection between what the Grid tells you and the broad purpose which the Grid interview(s) is meant to address. But it’s best if you can guide the interviewee to the insight, rather than do it yourself.

It’s also important to be clear about whom you will be giving feedback to. This is where the difference between ‘extractive’ and ‘reflective’ Grids becomes important. If you’re doing a research project for a client which means that you will have to do lots of interviews but probably with a limited time for each (therefore relying somewhat on the 80/20 rule) your main feedback will be a report to your client, with appropriate suggestions for actions, and the people you have interviewed may get a summary report. But if you’re doing a counselling interview, and therefore in ‘reflective’ mode, it’s your counselling client who needs the feedback and action planning.

Some Examples

Discussing how to give feedback is best illustrated by a series of examples, from which you can draw your own ideas – after all, no two Grid interviews are the same. The constant which should run through all interviews is encouragement, especially at the beginning – if you follow the advice to ‘let the works show,’ you’ll be making a pile of cards with constructs written on them, or a series of entries into a computer program, and once the interviewee has understood the two-against-one principle you can refer to the build-up of constructs and make a remark like ‘Now you see how it works, the more of these you can give me (add a phrase relevant to the purpose if appropriate) the better.’

The purpose of giving feedback, besides ordinary politeness, is that it will often facilitate the interviewee to give more information, or re-frame the issues. Unless you have decided to take the 80/20 rule – that is, to interview a number of people on the same topic and rely on the sample size to give you what you need – you can’t expect the interviewee to give you everything you both need in a nice neat orderly fashion, moving smoothly from elements to constructs to laddering to rating to matrix analysis and on to action planning. Often the most important insights have to be sweated for, because the Grid interview may be the first time that your interviewee has done some systematic introspection. This is why I suggested earlier that you should be ready to move around within the process itself, for instance by moving on to laddering for a while before going back to look for more constructs.

Patterns

The question which you’re likely to need most, for the interviewee and for yourself, is: ‘Can you see any patterns in here?’ It’s a good idea if you can see some, otherwise it’s a risky question, and as a general rule it’s best if the client can answer rather than your supplying it. Patterns can be obvious surprisingly early, but you must use your judgement about when to raise them – for example, I once did some work for a well-known High Street retailer with a reputation for excellence. They were worried about the turnover in their graduate trainees: a fair number didn’t last beyond the first month. I did a group construct elicitation session with (i) some of last year’s intake, (ii) some of this year’s intake, and (iii) some who’d been accepted but refused. For the elements, I asked each person to write (privately, of course) all the employers they’d applied to. With very few exceptions, the other employers were ‘blue chip’ companies, but hardly any others in the retail trade. I could have stopped the session there and reported back to the client that they were fishing in the wrong pond – they ought to be attracting the best of graduates interested in retailing, and not be in competition with ICI and BP and Shell. The constructs, and the group discussion afterwards, supported this insight. However the client didn’t like it, and they are now rather beleaguered by alligators.

If you have used element creation questions to get your elements – suppose that you’re doing a wide-scale training needs analysis and you’ve asked for critical incidents as elements – then provided that you have stuck to the same order of questions for all your interviewees, there may be a pattern which you can detect in the answers. For example, if you’ve asked for two really tough incidents, two which the interviewee thought would be tough but weren’t, two which the interviewee thought would be easy but weren’t, a routine enjoyable event, a routine disliked event, and one more ad lib – you may have something very interesting for your client, if there are clear patterns. (HINT: it’s always a good idea to ask the client to help you analyse the data. It helps you retain the ‘no interviewer bias’ standpoint, and it builds in ownership by the client. Also they might be able to read things which you can’t, because they work there. See the example below about construct elicitation done in a bank).

I don’t think I’d ever stop an interview simply to discuss patterns in the elements, because you could get stuck there. But it is often appropriate to stop and discuss patterns in the constructs, especially when the pattern relates to your purpose. Suppose for example that you were counselling someone who knew that they ought to get fit and take more exercise: you’d probably have an element set of ‘methods of getting fit’, like aerobics and swimming and tennis (NB. This element set would probably have been derived by your asking the client to name as many methods of getting fit as she could think of). Suppose furthermore that you could see a theme running through the constructs to do with not wanting to make a fool of herself in public, and another theme about not wanting to let the rest of the side down. You could ask her if she could spot any major themes running through her constructs. Or, if you were using cards or could print off her list of constructs, you could ask her to arrange them into themes; or you could ask her to sort them into high, medium, and low priority. If by that point she hasn’t grasped what’s obvious to you, you could try laddering up the high priority constructs and see if these themes emerged as you got closer to core constructs. If by that point she still hasn’t seen the theme, you have two choices: to go back to your non-interventionist role as a Grid interviewer, or to say ‘Well, I can see a couple of themes - would you like me to show you?’ and sort the cards yourself and pray for the insight to occur naturally, or you could come right out with it yourself. In making this decision, your guiding skills must be your skills as a counsellor – your reading of her body language and tone of voice, and the other ways you have learned of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent.

One point, though – when I did my first counselling Grids, I felt frightened by the speed with which the problem seemed to become obvious to me, though not necessarily for my client. Anxious not to fall into the trap of construing other people’s construing, I asked advice from more experienced practitioners. Their answers could be summed up as: ‘You’re probably right; this is one consequence of the lack of redundancy in the Grid process, because the interviewee can’t waffle on; but hold yourself back in order to give the interviewee time to see things, and be prepared to be wrong.’

Many ‘extractive’ uses of Grid use only construct elicitation (and laddering, of course) if they have a large sample to interview. This is often the best available research design, because while the technology to share and compare actual Grids exists, it usually imposes restrictions on the research design which are difficult to manage. I often use construct elicitation to measure corporate culture, usually as part of a change programme and/or to develop management competencies. Standard procedure is to ask people to name colleagues as elements (keeping them anonymous) and then elicit constructs ‘in terms of how they behave at work’. The analysis is a simple content analysis into the categories which suggest themselves from the constructs, and it is really helpful to enlist some people from the client organisation to help with the analysis (ownership and all that). Feedback is then to the client who commissioned the work; I usually do it by getting the senior managers together in a workshop environment and begin with something which gets them to recall the goals for the business - covering flip-charts with a SWOT analysis, or Hopes, Fears, and Expectations. Then I present the construct groupings, starting with the largest group first; and the question is ‘If these are your hopes for the business, and these are the terms in which your managers judge effectiveness, will this view of effectiveness support your achievement of the business plan?’ If so, fine; if not, we work on how it will have to change.

This is a very sweet and cost-effective intervention, and because Grid is interviewer bias-free it allows you to say ‘Fire me if you like, but they’ll continue to think like that.’ However, I did learn a salutary lesson about not construing other people’s construing when I did this work in a bank under severe threat. The main construct groupings were basically about being a nice guy and good at assessing credit. What struck me was that ‘sales effectiveness’ was largely equated with activity level, rather than skill, and I’d prepared myself to discuss that point. However, the Retail Manager pronounced himself delighted with that result, because – to quote him almost directly – ‘three months ago the little dears wouldn’t even have mentioned activity level.’ He said that he’d spent the last few months persuading them to put their boots on and get onto the playing field; skill in playing the game was the next item on his agenda.

Meaning lies in Function

Back to ‘reflective’ uses of Grid, where you have chosen to use a computer program to analyse your data. Here the possibilities and strategies for feedback are so many that we can only give a few examples, and leave it to your own practice to learn what seems to be appropriate. The principle to bear in mind is that Meaning lies in Function - in other words, you only know what a concept means to your interviewees if you see how they use them. You can base a good deal of feedback around this principle: for example, the best place to start can be looking at elements (or constructs) which are closely correlated, and asking if this represents the truth as they see it. So if the interview is about close relationships, you might ask ‘You’ve described yourself as very similar to your mother, but very different from your sister – would that be true?’ If your counselling skills tell you that you’ve probably hit a hot spot, then you’d probably probe this or ask if the interviewee wants to leave it for later. If the response is ‘No, I’m more different from my mother than this suggests,’ you can ask for a new construct which rates Mother at one end and Self at the other, and re-calculate the Grid. (Enquire Within^® makes this very easy for you – the differentiation process, as it’s known, is automated or you can do it visually). Probing similarities is often very useful when examining the constructs, because it gives you a sight of the interviewee’s stereotypes: if you get two constructs which are semantically different but are closely correlated – for example religious-atheist and bully-not a bully – the presumption is that the interviewee associates religious people with bullying behaviour, and atheists are seen as much less likely to be bullies. Obviously this is an area you would want to probe with your counselling skills.

The Ideal Element

Finally, another technique you can use when giving feedback is to invent an ‘ideal’ element, or offer a construct. So if we go back to the lady who wants to get fit but has problems with feeling incompetent and letting the side down, you can use the constructs – in the Grid, or just on their own – to develop an element called MY IDEAL WAY OF GETTING FIT. Rating it on the constructs will give you the criteria, which you can put in priority order; the interviewee then has a shopping list of questions to ask, or you may be able to make a suggestion yourself. Similarly, you could offer a construct if it is appropriate to the purpose and hasn’t appeared naturally.

Feedback is Essential

To summarise: feedback is an essential part of any Grid project, but as far as possible in the early stages you should try not to interpose your own interpretation; better to do it by open questions. At some point you will come to the action planning stage, which is where your own experience and wisdom will be in demand. Most important is to be able to know, yourself, when you have stepped out of the ‘I provide the structure, you provide the content’ role and started to share what you see.

And Never Ever Forget That Grid Is A Conversation!!!!

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

Skills for an Effective Rep Grid Interviewer

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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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