Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Fifth, more on Elements.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Fifth: Working with Elements (Two).

I left you in suspense at the end of the last posting, by saying that you might suspect that there’s more to the creation of an element set than the four principles I’d already given you – i.e. that elements should be concrete, discrete, homogenous, and of equal weight. What I left out was the fact that there are three ways of getting an element set: by offering an element set, by naming the category, and by using element creation questions. Here they are, in more detail:

Offered element sets:

This is the term for when you as the interviewer determine the element set in advance of the interview, with no input from the interviewee. Use it when you are certain that it is these elements, and these alone, which you want to start the interview. For example, if you were doing market research to see how people construed nine different brands of soap powder, you would use those nine brands as your elements. Or if you were doing separate Grids with all the members of a team about their perceptions of the other team members, then the team members must be the elements for every interview.

The advantage of using offered elements is simply that of control: you as the interviewer determine what the Grid interview will be about. The disadvantage is that your interviewee may not be familiar with some of the elements, and so you need to check that the interviewee does recognise all of them (and perhaps keep a few spare in reserve). But if you’re a market researcher and you specifically want to know how KWIKWASH compares with SOPE-A-DOPE, you’d better put them into the element set.

Offer a category:

With this strategy, you would name the category into which the elements should fall, but leave it up to the interviewee to name the actual elements: for example ‘Think of nine brands of soap powder,’ or ‘think of all the ways you know for cleaning clothes.’ One advantage of this is that you can be certain that the elements are known to the interviewee, but the corresponding disadvantage is that you might get a slight bias towards those which are more familiar and most liked. Another advantage is that you might, just might, learn something interesting about what exactly your interviewee believes fits into the category you’ve named – this is how I discovered the person who’d learned that if he took his dirty clothes to the local charity shop, he could usually buy them back cleaned and pressed a few days later and for less than it cost to sent them to the cleaners.

Use element creation questions:

This strategy has you, the interviewer, prepare a list of questions to which the answers will be the elements: for example ‘Tell me the soap powder you most prefer ... and one you’ve stopped using ... and one that your mother-in-law would recommend ... and another which you like... and another which you wouldn’t choose ...’ etc. There are several advantages in this process: it makes sure that you have a good scatter over the domain you are exploring, you know that the elements are familiar to the interviewee, there’s a stronger feeling of ownership, and if you are doing a project which involves getting Grids from several people then the collated answers to the element questions are themselves informative. The price you pay is that this kind of element set takes longer to elicit, but in many applications of Grid it’s worth it.

You can mix methods, but have a care:

You could, of course, use all three methods in the creation of any one element set – that is, you could start with some element creation questions (‘tell me your favourite soap powder … tell me one you’ve stopped using …’) then go on to name your category (‘can you name me a few more soap powders?’) and finally add KWIKWASH and SOPE-A-DOPE yourself. But if you do, then please use the three methods in the order I’ve suggested, because this gets the maximum information from the element creation session – if your interviewee stopped using SOPE-A-DOPE after getting a bad case of the hives, you need to give this information the opportunity to emerge during the creation process.

Make sure you cover both sides of the boundary:

Whatever strategy you use, if you are using Grid to help define a boundary then you need to have elements from both sides of the boundary. In other words, if you are using Grid to uncover how the interviewee perceives the characteristics of good team members, then you must have in your elements some good team members and some not-so-good, otherwise you won’t get the contrast. If you want to help someone explore occasions when they have successfully been assertive, you need in the element set some occasions which were successful and some which weren’t. And if you want to examine the characteristics of successful women managers, then you need to include (i) some unsuccessful women managers, and (ii) some successful male managers – because you’ve got two boundaries to investigate.


How many elements?

Going back to my analogy with a surveyor picking out highlights in the terrain: you need enough elements in the set to capture the significant features. In practice, it’s difficult to complete a Grid interview if you have fewer than six elements (you can start with a small number and develop new elements during the interview, but if you’re not going to get more than six elements then think of a different way of sampling the terrain). One very useful hint: if there are no other pressing reasons dictating the number of elements you have, then use nine. Then you can write a 3 x 3 matrix – 123, 456, 789 – and use this to order your triads. So you’ll have 123, then 456, then 789, then 147, 258, 369, and if you need more you can go diagonally 159, 267, 348, and so on. This has the advantage of giving you every element in the company of every other element in the shortest time, and it makes it easy for you to lay down the groups of three element cards in order and without having to shuffle.

An example: Doctors’ choice of specialties.

I guess you’re not going to work up a lather about selecting soap powders as elements, so let me give you a more interesting example using some work I did on the reasons why doctors choose their particular specialty. (The superordinate purpose was to suggest ways in which the least-chosen specialties, like psychiatry and geriatrics, could be made more attractive and to understand why there was such a crush of doctors pressing to get into the overcrowded specialties). I was given access to several hundred doctors, and had the opportunity to pilot all three element strategies, and here’s what I learned:

If I offered a complete set of elements, there was a strong chance that my interviewees might not be familiar with some of them – such as community medicine, epidemiology, blood transfusion, etc. – and often expressed frustration that they weren’t being asked about specialities about which they had strong feelings.

When I asked them to name some specialties, it was very obvious that they had a strong bias towards naming those that they liked or admired, so that strategy removed itself fairly quickly. I did, however, learn an interesting lesson about how to phrase the ‘name a category’ question, because one or two doctors said that when they’d finished their training they’d been strongly tempted to leave medicine completely and take up another career – for some reason, forestry received a number of mentions.

So I moved on to trying element creation questions: name your present specialty, another one that you considered, one that you would never have opted for, one that you wished you’d known more about, another one that you would never have chosen, and so on. Bearing in mind the number of doctors that I was interviewing, the answers to these element creation questions, collated appropriately, were themselves highly informative. I had the information to answer questions like: ‘what specialties would heart surgeons be least likely to consider as alternatives?’ and ‘what specialties do doctors wish they’d known more about before choosing?’

Eventually I settled on an element creation strategy where the first seven elements were achieved by using element creation questions, and then I had a store of those specialties which the sponsor wanted to include: so if psychiatry, geriatrics, etc. hadn’t been offered as answers to the element creation questions, I would supply two of them.

Some results:

The results were absolutely fascinating. (By the way, I’d taken the elementary precaution of asking my sponsor for their predictions before I started the research. They thought that money and status would play a large part in the doctors’ choice. They were wrong). Just a sprinkling of findings from the project:

There were some specialties about which doctors’ attitudes were polarised – easily the most common being pediatrics. Those doctors who wouldn’t opt for pediatrics said, in terms, ‘It’s difficult when the patient can’t talk to you, and if you lose a life you lose so much life,’ whereas those doctors who liked pediatrics said ‘It’s a real test of my diagnostic skills when the patient can’t talk, and if you save a life you’ve saved so much life.’

There was a clear division between surgeons’ constructs and everybody else’s, reflecting the life of a typical surgeon: surgeons are faced with far more black-and-white decisions (cut – don’t cut, remove – try to save, etc) and far more black-and-white consequences (patient dies or gets better – patient lingers). It reached the point where I could spot a surgeon’s constructs simply from the appearance of the interview record sheet, before reading the content.

A surprising number of doctors don’t like working with sick people. So they opt for specialties in which they’re dealing with basically healthy folk who need medical intervention – such as obstetrics, orthopaedics, epidemiology – and a smaller sample of doctors preferred it when their patients couldn’t talk back, so they went into anaesthetics.

As for the big question – why the least-preferred specialties were disliked – pay and status didn’t enter into it. The reasons why specialties like geriatrics and psychiatry were so infrequently chosen: you work in a low and distorted feedback environment, and it’s difficult or impossible to be able to heal your patient and to know that it was your efforts that were responsible for the healing. Compared with the heroic aspects of – say – emergency surgery, where you might dive into the abdomen of a dying patient and two weeks later see her depart the hospital looking fit and well, work with the elderly and the mentally ill was seen as offering very little opportunity to make a difference.

See you soon,

Love,

Valerie.