Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Ninth, Pause Awhile.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Ninth: Pause awhile.

I’m going to stop at this point, with a promise to return later. I’m stopping for two reasons:

I want to start another blog, on Assessment Centres and Development Centres, as well as lighten things up a bit by posting my selection of business and management jokes. Unfortunately I’ve got a crook back, and the amount of time I can spend at the computer is limited, so I can either do one or the other, and I’m horrified at what’s happening on the Assessment Centre front;

Apart from the personal reason, there’s a very good reason why anyone learning Grid should stop at this point. In my opinion, one of the reasons why Grid hasn’t taken its proper place as a research tool is that too many people have become dependent on computer programs to do the work for them; then they get disappointed (usually because they’ve chosen an inappropriate program) and stop. When we taught Grid at Brunel University in the 1970s, and when I wrote Business applications of the Repertory Grid in 1978, we didn’t have easy access to computer programs, so we taught low-tech applications … and on reflection, I think that we provided a better teaching experience. Our students learned the basics of Grid interviewing, and designing a Grid-based project, and they had to think hard about the best design to give them the information they needed. Nowadays it’s almost impossible to find a course that’ll teach Grid interviewing from scratch; you can find courses on Personal Construct Theory, but I know from years of corresponding with newcomers to Grid that many of them had been thrown in at the deep end without this basic training. So I’d rather ask you to pause here and get proficient with the fundamental principles, and then we’ll talk about computer-based analyses.

I ought to explain one point that may have been puzzling you – because so far I’ve talked about the Repertory Grid interview technique, but where’s the Grid? Well, the next stage in a Grid interview is to turn the constructs into bipolar scales, and ask the interviewee to rate all the elements on all the scales. This gives you a matrix – a Grid – and the matrix can be subjected to all sorts of questioning.

What went wrong – I must stress that this is a personal view, but I’m by no means alone in holding it – is that far too many people used inappropriate statistical analyses on the matrix. I’m talking about the many variations on Principal Components Analysis, which reduces the matrix to two or three statistical variables. This loses much of the subtlety of the Grid interview, and prevents some of the interesting ways in which the interviewee’s understanding can be developed … but it looks easy. Please don’t go there – there are better ways. And amongst the better ways are more low-tech procedures that can be applied to the full Grid, as I’ll show you.

One of the differences between a blog and a textbook is that the blog is real-time. What I’d like to do now is to move from doing a daily posting to (probably) one per week, still exploring the low-tech uses of Grid; and I’m open for questions at all times. But given that my time’s limited, I need to move to the subject of Assessment Centres and deliver myself of a lifetime’s collection of jokes. See you soon,

Love,

Valerie.