Teaching and Learning the Repertory Grid Interview

 

I’m not talking about learning the theory, or any of the advanced analyses. I’m talking about what happens when you first encounter Grid as a learner, because three things happen at once and unless you’re prepared for it - as learner or as teacher - it can feel rather odd.

I always tell people this at the start of a course on Grid. After introducing the basic concepts (Kelly’s concerns about interviewer bias, etc. plus elements and constructs) I tell them that their learning will be on three parallel streams, and that different people will be in different streams at any particular time. I’ve never found a way of reducing the number of streams, so I find that the best thing is to tell them in advance.

What are these three streams?

Administration.

They will be learning the physical task of managing the cards: one set of cards for the elements, another for the constructs (I always advise writing the constructs on cards, usually about 8 inches by 5: write the construct in the middle, and then you can record the laddering up and down results on the same cards). If the element cards are in any special order, they’ll have to take care of that. By the way, it’s essential to have the element written one per card, so that you can shuffle. Don’t write the elements on a list and ask people to look at numbers 2, 5 and 7. Physically moving the cards around makes it much easier for the interviewee to understand.

At the same time, they’ll be practising saying the formula: ‘Tell me something that two of these have in common that makes them different from the other,’ and its variations. And they have to learn the practice of silence: don’t suggest, don’t summarise, remember that your interviewees’ silence means that they’re thinking. Unlearn everything you learned on your Active Listening course.

Listening for themes and meaning

Even though this is a practice session, which probably means that the elements are easy to work with – I usually use elements like cars, or television programmes, or books they’ve read, rather than starting with a set of significant others - they’ll be processing the information coming from the interviewee, their minds will be racing ahead to questions about how they will analyse and interpret the data. And of course they’ll ask questions, which means that as a teacher you have to do a fine balancing act: answering the questions in just enough detail to satisfy those who are concerned, without getting into a long discussion about the myriad of analyses and purposes available. Long explanations at this stage will not suit everyone and will distract people from the task of practice.

What else can I use this for?

As people get deeper into practising Grid, they’ll start to think of other purposes for this superb methodology. So you’ll have lots of questions starting with ‘Can you use Grid to ....?’, and the answer will almost certainly be Yes but that won’t be enough.

Important teaching points

So, you have these three separate learning streams: administration, analysis, and applications. You’ll also have some teaching points which you want to make sure are covered thoroughly, which means that there are times when you want to ask for everyone’s attention for some formal input on topics like:

• the importance of the purpose in helping you configure the session
• the strategies for choosing an element set
• the characteristics of a good element set
• different types of construct - propositional, behavioural, evaluative, etc.
• laddering up and down
• choosing qualifiers
• methods of analysis
• the importance of feedback and involving the subject in the analysis

Transition to roles and responsibilities

My own experience is that it’s difficult to teach even the basics of Grid in less than two days. Often I’m working with an in-house team who have a particular project to do, and so the teaching is focussed in the needs of that project. I’ve noticed – and I always tell people this – that one of the most useful components of a Grid course is the night’s sleep they’ll get between the first and second days. It seems that overnight the unconscious processes what’s been learned and puts it into some kind of order. So the objective for the second day is to have all the team clear about their roles and responsibilities. However, on the second day people will be ready to ask questions (and understand the answers) about the wider uses of Grid. It’s at this point that you get questions like ‘Can I suggest an element of my own?’ or ‘Do you need to do a full analysis?’ and so on. At this point – if not before – I introduce the Universal FlipChart, which contains just two words: IT DEPENDS.

What this means is that once people have learned the unusual disciplines of Grid – especially the fact that it’s a co-operative exercise, interviewers have learned not to interrupt or summarise or construe other people’s construing - you can do anything you like with Grid as long as you have chosen to do so, you know why, and you know what effect it could have. So, for example, you can suggest an element or a construct if it will help your purpose – but only if you have first learned the disciplines involved in not doing so. But if you suggest rather a lot of them, it may convey to the client a subtle message that you’re only interested in certain categories, or there may be a ‘right answer’, and so on.

Practical experience

If I’m working with an in-house team to one purpose, then the next step is to do some accompanied interviews – I’ll take each person out for a day, we’ll do four interviews. I do the first while the trainee ‘shadows’ me – doing their best to capture the content themselves. Then we reverse roles; and then we decide how best to use the remaining two interviews.

If, on the other hand, the teaching programme is to teach the use of Grid for any circumstances, my preference is for a third day in which the learners go into small groups and help one another design their own research protocols for their own issues, so that they can configure a whole project, including analysis and feedback. And who knows where it goes from there?

The important message

However, the most important message in this hint is to prepare you for these three parallel learning streams. Enquire Within gives you a lot of help with the administration, but the approach still takes some getting used to. Once you’re past that stage – and the learning curve can be very steep – you’re ready for the real work of design, analysis, feedback, and mining your data.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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