You can use the Repertory Grid interview to explore your subject’s understanding of almost any topic where they have some experience. I hope that I’ve shown you how the construct elicitation process allows you to eavesdrop on the language they use when thinking about the topic. For the practice in construct elicitation, I supplied you with the necessary elements – famous people, cars, people in your life, and so on. Now we need to turn our attention to how the Grid practitioner formulates an element set that’s appropriate to the purpose.
At this point I need to pause and emphasise that every Grid interview needs a purpose. Without a clear purpose you could collect furniture-vans full of data that will be completely irrelevant, or you could miss asking some important questions. Even the mini-interviews that I offer here for practice have a purpose, and it’s worth learning how a skilled Grid practitioner would describe the configuration of a specific interview:
A few examples of Grid interviews properly described:
To help choose my next holiday, to suit a limited budget and my limited mobility.
To think about the people in my team, with the aim of reducing the internal conflict.
To analyse our customers in order to direct our sales efforts more cost-effectively.
To determine the characteristics of successful women managers in this business, with the aim of improving our performance as an equal opportunity employer.
And for your next task:
Have a go at producing an element set that would be appropriate to each of these purposes.
Please don’t read on until you’ve had a wee think about each one (I’ll reveal all towards the end of this post).
An overview of element selection strategies:
Most Grid interviews use at least six elements (nine’s actually a good number, as I’ll show you) and the elements should be concrete examples taken from the field that you want the interview to explore. I find it useful to think of this stage as rather like a surveyor setting out to map a new area: the surveyor starts by selecting a good range of the features of this area – hills, churches, ponds, bridges, masts, etc. – and then fills in the detail of the ground between said features. There are some key principles that will help you get a good element set (by good, I mean one that will enable the production of appropriate constructs):
Elements must be concrete. That is, elements are usually nouns/noun phrases or events or activities, but they shouldn’t be abstract concepts. I’m fond of saying that ‘an element should hurt when you drop it on your foot;’ elements are usually people or objects, or (these are more difficult to use) events or activities but the sort of event or activity that could be captured on a film-clip. You’ll hardly ever go wrong by making your element set more concrete – the more concrete the element set, the better you’ll be able to elicit constructs. For example, let’s assume that we want to explore your perceptions of political leaders. When I’m teaching Grid, I’ll often ask the class to say what sort of elements they would select, because I’m deliberately leading them into making a common mistake so that they won’t make it again. Almost certainly, some of the class will suggest as elements words like CHARISMA, DECISIVENESS, DIVISIVE, YOUTHFUL, EXPERIENCED … So I ask them to take any three of these and tell me what two have in common that make them different from the third, and you can hear the trucks colliding with one another as they realise that probably the only construct they can offer is good – bad. That’s what happens when you use abstract concepts as elements. Another way of phrasing this difficulty is to point out that each of these words is, in fact, half of a construct, thus: has charisma – lacks charisma, decisive – indecisive, divisive – inclusive, and so on. If you can make yourself ‘hear’ the opposite pole of your element, it isn’t an element. And, of course, the appropriate element set to explore your perceptions of political leaders is … political leaders.
Elements must be discrete. This means that they mustn’t overlap, nor should one element ‘contain’ another element. For example, if you were doing a Grid to help choose a car, you wouldn’t want to use an element set that contained both TOYOTA and PRIUS, because Toyota makes the Prius and it would be difficult to strike a good contrast at construct elicitation. If you were helping Mum explore her relationship with her children (and especially her problems with discipline in the home) you might choose an element set of occasions that Mum feels strongly about, but you probably wouldn’t want to use GETTING THEM OUT OF BED ON TIME and ARGUING ABOUT WATCHING BREAKFAST TV IN THEIR BEDROOMS because on the face of it they do look very similar to each other and you might have problems getting a good contrast.
An element set must be homogenous. All the elements should belong to the same ‘family.’ So, to return to our troubled mother for a moment, you wouldn’t get very far with an element set that contained GETTING THEM OUT OF BED ON TIME, PERSUADING THEM TO EAT VEGETABLES, HELPING THEM DEAL WITH BULLYING, and EMMA, JACK, and BECKY. Try a mix of event-elements and people-elements in a thought experiment and see how clumsy it feels …
All the elements must carry approximately the same ‘weight.’ If you have a set of nine elements, it ought to feel as if all elements have the same right to be there. Going back to using cars as elements, if the purpose is to help the interviewee choose which car to buy, you probably don’t want MODEL T FORD as an element in amongst the products of Audi and Toyota and Saab and the other present-day models, because the likelihood of your interviewee being able to choose a Model T Ford is vanishingly small – as is the likelihood that they may have any real experience of one.
OK. There’s something more to be said about element selection, but I’ll leave that until the next post. But I need to address your comfort level, please …
When I’m teaching Grid, and we’ve got a chart of the principles of element selection in view, I sometimes hear people saying ‘how are we going to remember all this?’ and ‘is it worth learning all these rules?’ I’d like to say that first, it’s easier than it looks; with a very little practice these principles start to become second nature. Second, I’d like to say that Grid gives you lots of bites at the cherry, and this is one of its joys. You can try out an element set in your head and see if it generates the sort of constructs that you’ll need, and if it doesn’t you can change it. And when you’re doing a Grid-based project, you can move around the different stages, and change the configurations, until you hit the motherlode.
I’m spending so much time on the basic principles of Grid because – in my view – this is one aspect of Grid practice that usually isn’t taught very well, and without these disciplines you run into furniture-vans full of data that are meaningless. The analogy I like to use is that a Grid interview is a little like going into a church and hearing a beautiful piece of music being played on the organ; you can love the beauty of the experience, but you only see the skill that’s gone into the performance if you take a look at the number of stops and keyboards that the organist had to choose from, and the particular register chosen to illustrate the music’s full potential.
Answers to the Task:
Earlier in this posting I asked you to produce an element set that would be appropriate to each of these purposes:
To help choose my next holiday, to suit a limited budget and my limited mobility.
To think about the people in my team, with the aim of reducing the internal conflict.
To analyse our customers in order to direct our sales efforts more cost-effectively.
To determine the characteristics of successful women managers in this business, with the aim of improving our performance as an equal opportunity employer.
How did you get on?
Choosing a holiday – you’ll need an element set consisting of holiday locations, or holiday packages …
Reducing the conflict in my team – you’ll need an element set consisting of all the team members …
Analysing our customers in order to direct our sales efforts – you’ll need an element set of customers …
Analysing the characteristics of successful women managers – you’ll need an element set of managers …
And if you have the feeling that I haven’t told you everything yet, you’re right. Wait for the next posting – it shouldn’t take too long.
Blessings,
Valerie.
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