Saving Time and Improving Precision

This page is written for anyone intending to use Repertory Grid for their research and considering using Enquire Within®. It is especially important at the planning stage of your project.

The Enquire Within computer software process is much more than data analysis. It is designed to support you through all the stages of gathering and refining your information, analysing the Grid matrix, feeding back the results to the interviewee and refining it further if that is appropriate. The Enquire Within programme uses a series of dialog boxes, some with multiple options. It uses resource files (i.e. files of elements, element creation questions, purposes, qualifiers, and complete sessions) which you can create in advance of your interview or create at the start of the session.

For example, Enquire Within offers you three different dialog boxes with which to create constructs: one where the program selects the element triads at random, one in which you can physically move the elements around on the screen, and one for entering any construct which occurs at any other time.

Laddering, up and down, is provided for in a series of dialog boxes: you have a choice of methods for laddering up, and a choice of prompts for laddering down.

You can ‘mark’ constructs as they occur, and assign priorities to constructs, so that later you could choose to work with those you have marked, or the high priority ones.

When you reach the stage of rating the elements on the constructs, you can re-write a construct to make it a better fit. And when Enquire Within performs the dendritic analysis on the matrix, you can differentiate the highly-correlated elements or constructs automatically or you can select them yourself.

This is far from an exhaustive list of Enquire Within’s features. We designed the program so that it would support the interviewer in doing anything which you would want to do in a face-to-face interview – your interview should not in any way be limited by the technology. Also we wanted the program to reflect that Repertory Grid is a structured conversation, not a statistical matrix. The matrix, and its analysis, is part of the conversation – an important part, deserving the most sensitive examination – but it is only a part.

Elsewhere in this site, you will find more information about analysing Grid interviews, about the importance of considering your method(s) of analysis at the time you plan your project, and about the importance of remembering that Grid is a conversation. This page is here because:

• at the very least, the Enquire Within process saves you a lot of unnecessary work, because you don’t need to enter your data twice, and
• when used properly, will make each interview much more sensitive, targeted, and focussed than you could achieve with manual recording.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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