I promised to keep posting at roughly weekly intervals ... that was a firm intention, but it got rather interfered with because I've got a damaged back - makes it difficult to stay at the word-processor for any length of time, and the medication th doctor gave me made no difference to the pain but made me as sleepy as all get-out. I've been wandering around in a daze, remembering that I used to have a brain but some son of a bachelor has stolen the key.
Anyway, they've changed the medication. It's making no difference to the pain (and hence to the time I can spend at the w/p) but at least I can respond to stimulation. So next week I want to look up some case studies - again, for low-tech applications, I make no apology - and I'll post them.
Meantime, have you looked at my blog of business jokes and anecdotes? It's got some goodies, and you could show it to your mother ...
Love,
V.
Saturday 24 April 2010
Monday 5 April 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday 31 March 2010
Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Eighth, Feedback.
Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Eighth: Feedback.
This posting makes some assumptions – that you have practised your interviewing technique and can be sure that you are not imposing your own framework on the interviewee; that you have absorbed the message of the importance of planning your analysis from the start, and that you realise that Grid isn’t a piece of paper or a computer print-out – it’s a conversation; and that you don’t need advice on the interpersonal skills needed to be a good listener and counsellor. In that case, there are three golden rules for feedback:
· give it;
· always relate it to the purpose;
· ask for it.
In good Grid feedback the principle is for the interviewer to act, as much as possible, as a skilled mirror: that is, to ask questions and give information which will encourage the interviewees to see things for themselves, rather than the interviewer offering an interpretation or judgment. This is why it’s important to be aware of when, and how, you offer your own thoughts. There may be a time when you need to; and there will certainly be a point where you have to make the connection between what the Grid tells you and the broad purpose which the Grid interview(s) is meant to address. But it’s best if you can guide the interviewee to the insight, rather than do it yourself.
This means that before you start interviewing, you need to be clear about the contract you have with your interviewee. Is it a counselling contract, or are you engaged in research? What will happen to the results of the interview? How long do you expect to take, and will you be available for further consultation?
The purpose of giving feedback, besides ordinary politeness, is that it will often facilitate the interviewee to give more information, or re-frame the issues. Unless you have decided to take the 80/20 rule – that is, to interview a number of people on the same topic and rely on the sample size to give you what you need – you can’t expect the interviewee to give you everything you both need in a nice neat orderly fashion, moving smoothly from elements to constructs to laddering and through the next stages until you’re done. Often the most important insights have to be winkled out, because the Grid interview may be the first time that your interviewee has done some systematic introspection. You should be ready to move around within the process itself, for instance by moving on to laddering for a while before going back to look for more constructs.
Also: you can expect many interviews to begin with a few propositional constructs – they usually come easily – which is why you need to ask the ‘in terms of’ question, to move the interviewee towards giving you more personal constructs. However, if they get ‘stuck’ on propositional constructs, it’s a sign that they’re uncomfortable. Remember that a Grid interview can’t be faked, so if someone feels uncomfortable with the process then retreating into propositional constructs (or silence) is their only available option. Maybe you didn’t explain the contract properly? Maybe they don’t trust your assurances about what will happen to the data? If they’re having trouble with the two-against-one comparison, then I suggest you use the Full Context presentation – that is, lay out your element cards in front of the subject, ask them to pick out the two that are most alike, and then ask for the one that’s most different. A few rounds like this ought to break the log-jam and you can go back to presenting triads – or you can stick with the Full Context presentation, as long as all the elements are used in the comparisons.
The constant which should run through all interviews is encouragement, especially at the beginning – I always advise interviewers to ‘let the works show.’ So if you can sit catty-corner round the table, so that your interviewee can read what you’re writing, once the interviewee has understood the two-against-one principle you can refer to the build-up of constructs and make a remark like ‘Now you see how it works, the more of these you can give me (add a phrase relevant to the purpose if appropriate) the better.’
The question which you’re likely to need most, for the interviewee and for yourself, is: Can you see any patterns in here? It’s a good idea if you can see some yourself, otherwise it’s a risky question, but as a general rule it’s best if the client can answer rather than your supplying it. (Patterns can be obvious surprisingly early, but you must use your judgement about when to raise them. I’ll give you a couple of examples later).
I don’t think I’d ever stop an interview simply to discuss patterns in the elements, because you could get stuck there. But it is often appropriate to stop and discuss patterns in the constructs, especially when the pattern relates to your purpose. Suppose for example that you were counselling someone who knew that they ought to get fit and take more exercise: you’d probably have an element set of ‘methods of getting fit’, like aerobics and swimming and tennis (NB. This element set would probably have been derived by your asking the client to name as many methods of getting fit as she could think of). Suppose furthermore that you could see a theme running through the constructs to do with not wanting to make a fool of herself in public, and another theme about not wanting to let the rest of the side down. You could ask her if she could spot any major themes running through her constructs. Or you could hand her the pack of construct cards and ask her to arrange them into themes; or you could ask her to sort them into high, medium, and low priority. If by that point she hasn’t grasped what’s obvious to you, you could try laddering up the high priority constructs and see if these themes emerged as you got closer to core constructs. If by that point she still hasn’t seen the theme, you have two choices: to go back to your non-interventionist role as a Grid interviewer, or to say ‘Well, I can see a couple of themes - would you like me to show you?’ and sort the cards yourself and pray for the insight to occur naturally, or you could come right out with it yourself. In making this decision, your guiding skills must be your skills as a counsellor – your reading of her body language and tone of voice, and the other ways you have learned of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent.
Another technique you can use when giving feedback is to invent a new element when you’ve got a list of constructs – as I showed in the previous posting. So if we go back to the lady who wants to get fit but has problems with feeling incompetent and letting the side down, you can use the constructs – in the Grid, or just on their own – to develop an element called MY IDEAL WAY OF GETTING FIT. Rating it on the constructs will give you the criteria, which you can put in priority order; the interviewee then has a shopping list of questions to ask, or you may be able to make a suggestion yourself.
I’ve referred already to the fact that I often use construct elicitation to measure corporate culture, usually as part of a change programme and/or to develop management competencies. The standard procedure is to ask people to name colleagues as element (keeping them anonymous) and then elicit constructs ‘in terms of how they behave at work’. The analysis is a simple content analysis into the categories which suggest themselves from the constructs - it is really helpful to enlist some people from the client organisation to help with the interviewing and subsequent analysis (it does wonders for their feelings of ownership and all that). I’ll then give feedback is then to the client who commissioned the work; I usually do it by getting the senior managers together in a workshop environment and begin with something which gets them to recall the goals for the business - covering flip-charts with a SWOT analysis, or Hopes, Fears, and Expectations. Then I present the construct groupings, starting with the largest group first; and the question is If these are your hopes for the business, and these are the terms in which your managers judge effectiveness, will this view of effectiveness support your achievement of the business plan? If so, fine; if not, we work on how it will have to change.
This is a very sweet and cost-effective intervention, and because Grid is interviewer bias-free it allows you to say ‘Fire me if you like, but they’ll continue to think like that.’ However, I did learn a salutary lesson when I did this work in a bank under severe threat. The main construct groupings were basically about being a nice guy and good at assessing credit. What struck me was that ‘sales effectiveness’ was largely equated with activity level, rather than skill, and I’d prepared myself to discuss that point. However, the Retail Manager pronounced himself delighted with that result, because – to quote him almost directly – ‘three months ago the little dears wouldn’t even have mentioned activity level.’ He said that he’d spent the last few months persuading them to put their boots on and get onto the playing field; skill in playing the game was the next item on his agenda. Slap hands, Valerie, and don’t go construing other people’s construing.
However, sometimes it can seem as if the interview is uncovering the issues so quickly that you want to slow down and take stock; it feels as if you’re hurtling towards a conclusion and you don’t want to interpose your own interpretation. When I did my first counselling Grids, I felt frightened by the speed with which the problem seemed to become obvious to me, though not necessarily for my client. Anxious not to fall into the trap of construing other people’s construing, I asked advice from more experienced practitioners. Their answers could be summed up as: You’re probably right; this is one consequence of the lack of redundancy in the Grid process, because the interviewee can’t woffle on; but hold yourself back in order to give the interviewee time to see things, and be prepared to be wrong.
Another story: I once did some work for a well-known High Street retailer with a reputation for excellence. They were worried about the turnover in their graduate trainees: a fair number didn’t last beyond the first month. I did a group construct elicitation session with (i) some of last year’s intake, (ii) some of this year’s intake, and (iii) some who’d been accepted but refused. For the elements, I asked each person to write (privately, of course) all the employers they’d applied to – and the problem had become apparent in the first ten minutes, because with very few exceptions, the other employers were ‘blue chip’ companies, but hardly any in the retail trade. I could have stopped the session there and reported back to the client that they were fishing in the wrong pond – they ought to be attracting the best of graduates interested in retailing, and not be in competition with ICI and BP and Shell. The constructs, and the group discussion afterwards, supported this insight. Sad to say, the client didn’t like the advice – and the subsequent travails of their share price gave me an opportunity (which I didn’t take) to say I told you so.
To summarise: feedback is an essential part of any Grid project, but as far as possible in the early stages you should try not to interpose your own interpretation; better to do it by open questions. At some point you will come to the action planning stage, which is where your own experience and wisdom will be in demand. Most important is to be able to know, yourself, when you have stepped out of the ‘I provide the structure, you provide the content’ role and started to share what you see … but it’s always best to share your data and use Grid as a shared adult-to-adult research or problem-solving project.
And Never Ever Forget That Grid Is A Conversation!!!!
Tuesday 30 March 2010
Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Seventh, Analysis (One).
Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Seventh: Analysis (One).
I hope you enjoyed your homework … you should have generated some constructs (and maybe some insights) about careers, relationships, and motivation. I deliberately teased you a little, by leaving some loose ends – I hoped that some questions would form in your head, and in this posting I hope I can answer some of them.
One of the most important considerations when you are planning a Grid-based project is the question of where in the process you are going to find your most useful and insightful information – where’s the beef? I’ve already lamented the trend for rushing through an ill-thought-out ‘construct grab’ in haste to get some data that can be put through a computer program; you can actually do a good deal of work with Grid without going near a computer, and I personally wish that this stage played a larger part in the training of novice Grid practitioners – then I wouldn’t get so many questions saying ‘I’ve put it all through the computer but I still don’t know what it means,’ and I wouldn’t have to spend so much time thinking of variations on ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.’
So, and taking a guess at the experiences you may have had while doing the three suggested homework topics, let’s take a look at where in a Grid interview the important information is to be found. Of course, it depends on the purpose and therefore on the elements and the kind of constructs you elicit, but here are some typical – and simple – analyses:
1. The number of constructs generated.
Did you by any chance try the career choice interview on a passing teenager? Or on someone else who hasn’t much experience of the world of work? Because if you did, you might have been surprised at how few constructs – especially constructs that weren’t propositional – your interviewee could produce.
Or, if you missed that particular opportunity, try giving me some constructs about the following elements:
PRINT OF THE WAVE
TREE OF LIFE
TRINITY
Bet you can’t – unless you’re interested in the history of old Shetland knitting patterns, because they’re the names of three different patterns that womenfolk would knit into their men’s sweaters.
You can’t produce constructs about a subject about which you know nothing; and if someone can only produce a limited number of constructs – especially if they produce mainly propositional constructs – then you may, just may, be justified in coming to the conclusion that they haven’t much experience of the subject.
Obviously, this is a very coarse measure indeed, and you’d only be justified in taking any notice of it when you can be absolutely certain that your subject was comfortable with the process, that you’d tried several approaches to eliciting constructs, and that there really was nothing else left to say. But it can be a useful measure, especially when you want to compare and contrast – for example, I used a simple construct count as a before-and-after evaluation of a training course, because the least you’d expect after a successful training event is that the person has more constructs than they started out with; another example is a study of the construct systems of venture capitalists, where the least successful of the sample had less than half the number of constructs of anyone else.
Be careful with this measure. It’s more useful when used to measure difference than to draw conclusions from one single measure, and if you have to use statistics to ask whether the difference matters, you shouldn’t be asking the question – the contrast should hit you in the back of the neck. But in the appropriate circumstances, it’s a useful measure in its own right and can point you in the next direction you want to examine.
2. Content analysis of constructs.
The practice session on relationships ought to have given you an insight into the importance of analysing the actual content of the constructs, especially if you made the opportunity to interview one or two other people as well as yourself. Did you notice any particular themes emerging? and did you extract different themes from different people? I’d be very surprised if you didn’t – if not in the first round of constructs, then at the point when you started laddering up.
Remember, the Grid interview lets you eavesdrop on the language your subject has developed in order to navigate their way around the world. So if your subject felt that they’d had their trust broken rather too often, and perhaps found it hard to judge whether someone was trustworthy, you’d expect a lot of constructs that related to how trustworthy their people were. I’ve conducted interviews in which money and worldly success accounted for a good half of the subject’s constructs, and interviews where these didn’t figure at all; interviews in which religious belief and practice were important, and interviews where religion got no mention, and so on.
Again, before you think about analysing the results, you need to be certain that you’ve given the available constructs the best chance of coming to the surface (and I’ll say more about this in a later posting) and you should look for broad themes rather than fine distinctions.
I frequently use content analysis of constructs in projects where a group of people will be interviewed and their results pooled. Mostly I’ll be working on an organisation change project, where the first task is to determine the present culture of the organisation – in order to ask the question ‘how does it need to change?’ Mostly I’ll be asking managers to give me constructs about their colleagues and subordinates (whose identities are kept anonymous – I’m only interested in the constructs). I showed you a number of examples of this sort of study in the third posting, so I’ll not repeat myself here. What I do need to say is that when you’re doing a content analysis of the constructs, one of the most important skills to develop is that of recognising what’s been left out – observe that money hasn’t been mentioned in the constructs about your relationships ... observe that none of your managers mention innovation when thinking about their colleagues ... etc. Unfortunately there isn’t a Universal Directory of Constructs where you could look up the answer to the ‘what’s missing?’ question – though I will try to help you where I can – but let me say that if you’re aware of the need to develop this skill, and you practice before going ‘live’ on a new topic, then the skill usually develops at a good deliberate speed. (The only circumstances where it won’t are if the interviewer doesn’t listen; Grid interviewing is a great way to improve one’s listening skills).
3. Responses to Element Creation Questions:
Remember the example of using Grid to examine the reasons why doctors chose their specialties? There I used a set of element creation questions – asking for preferred and non-preferred specialties, etc. – and there were patterns in the answers to those questions, patterns which could themselves be analysed for useful information before we even got to construct elicitation. That’s one example of an application where the ‘beef’ begins to emerge in the very first stage of the interview.
The third practice session I gave you – on motivation, where you were asked to think about the high points and the down bits and the plateau times – was an example of what we call an unrehearsed element set. That is, you’re asking questions which most people may not formally have asked themselves before, and it’s unlikely that the responses will come tripping off the subject’s tongue. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been asked to draw an ‘emotional graph’ of your life-span, with its ups and downs – that’s a technique often used in counselling, and just looking at the highs and lows can be instructive even before you start asking for the reasons.
As a rough generalisation, unrehearsed element sets are more likely to be events or activities than things or people; usually, we’ve thought about the people in our lives and many of the ‘things’ that we have to choose between, so the ‘beef’ comes when you start to elicit constructs, or when you go on to laddering – or maybe even later. When you’ve had more practice in designing Grid sessions, I hope you’ll come to realise that many interview purposes can be achieved in two or three different ways, with different element sets: for example, you can do a very interesting ‘help me choose a car’ interview by creating element creation questions that single out various kinds of ‘critical incident’ while driving – now there’s an unrehearsed element set for almost anyone except a driving instructor, and if you feel like some more homework why not give that a try?
4. Using the constructs to create some new elements.
If you go back to the constructs you obtained in the career choice exercise, you could start to draw a profile of MY IDEAL CAREER or THE CAREER MOST LIKELY TO PROVE DISASTROUS, by deciding which pole of each construct you prefer and how strongly you feel about it. Then you’re part-way to preparing an aide-memoire to help you – or your interviewee – ask useful questions about potential job choices, or to understand why you might feel like a square peg in a round hole if you’re unhappy in the present job.
If you’d like to try something potentially more powerful, more rewarding, go back to your session on relationships and use the constructs to create some new elements. For example, if you’re in the habit of falling for people who turn out to be bad for you, try creating and rating the element I FALL FOR AND IT ENDS IN TEARS, or however you feel like phrasing it … one woman who did this had a huge Aha! moment and I realised that I had a habit of falling for the lonely hero whom only I could understand and accompany on his quest, but when the chips were down I’d be pushed aside … I require the Universe to bring me a thoughtful pipe-smoking historian who’ll absolutely adore me. Or there was the chap who realised that I keep falling for women who like being spoiled, treated with old-fashioned courtesy, made a fuss of … except that there are times when I want to be spoiled and given a treat, and it didn’t happen.
Experiment with various ‘created’ elements, getting a sense of how to create an element or elements that will be informative – for example:
WHAT S/HE SEEMED LIKE WHEN WE MET and WHAT S/HE SEEMED LIKE WHEN WE PARTED (where s/he represents a special relationship that went wrong);
MY IDEAL RELATIONSHIP;
THE RELATIONSHIP MY PARENTS WANT ME TO HAVE;
and so on. I’ll say more about creating elements part-way through in a later posting. I want to finish by raising a question, thus:
Who’s doing the analysis anyway?
So far, I’ve rather given the impression that the interviewer also does the analysis – look at what’s been generated in the interview and draw some conclusions from it. In fact, it’s much better if the interviewee is involved in the analysis also: better for the interviewee’s comfort, better for their trust in the process, but – crucially – because it’s their information they’ve generated and they’re interested in it, maybe more likely to see what’s important, to get involved. In fact, there’s a cardinal rule in good grid practice: Don’t construe other people’s construing, meaning ‘don’t you go drawing conclusions from the results – ask your interviewee.’ I’ll talk some more about feedback, ownership, and interviewee involvement in the next post – for the moment, may I just plant the seed that Grid isn’t something you do to people, it’s something you do with people.
Love,
Valerie.
I hope you enjoyed your homework … you should have generated some constructs (and maybe some insights) about careers, relationships, and motivation. I deliberately teased you a little, by leaving some loose ends – I hoped that some questions would form in your head, and in this posting I hope I can answer some of them.
One of the most important considerations when you are planning a Grid-based project is the question of where in the process you are going to find your most useful and insightful information – where’s the beef? I’ve already lamented the trend for rushing through an ill-thought-out ‘construct grab’ in haste to get some data that can be put through a computer program; you can actually do a good deal of work with Grid without going near a computer, and I personally wish that this stage played a larger part in the training of novice Grid practitioners – then I wouldn’t get so many questions saying ‘I’ve put it all through the computer but I still don’t know what it means,’ and I wouldn’t have to spend so much time thinking of variations on ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.’
So, and taking a guess at the experiences you may have had while doing the three suggested homework topics, let’s take a look at where in a Grid interview the important information is to be found. Of course, it depends on the purpose and therefore on the elements and the kind of constructs you elicit, but here are some typical – and simple – analyses:
1. The number of constructs generated.
Did you by any chance try the career choice interview on a passing teenager? Or on someone else who hasn’t much experience of the world of work? Because if you did, you might have been surprised at how few constructs – especially constructs that weren’t propositional – your interviewee could produce.
Or, if you missed that particular opportunity, try giving me some constructs about the following elements:
PRINT OF THE WAVE
TREE OF LIFE
TRINITY
Bet you can’t – unless you’re interested in the history of old Shetland knitting patterns, because they’re the names of three different patterns that womenfolk would knit into their men’s sweaters.
You can’t produce constructs about a subject about which you know nothing; and if someone can only produce a limited number of constructs – especially if they produce mainly propositional constructs – then you may, just may, be justified in coming to the conclusion that they haven’t much experience of the subject.
Obviously, this is a very coarse measure indeed, and you’d only be justified in taking any notice of it when you can be absolutely certain that your subject was comfortable with the process, that you’d tried several approaches to eliciting constructs, and that there really was nothing else left to say. But it can be a useful measure, especially when you want to compare and contrast – for example, I used a simple construct count as a before-and-after evaluation of a training course, because the least you’d expect after a successful training event is that the person has more constructs than they started out with; another example is a study of the construct systems of venture capitalists, where the least successful of the sample had less than half the number of constructs of anyone else.
Be careful with this measure. It’s more useful when used to measure difference than to draw conclusions from one single measure, and if you have to use statistics to ask whether the difference matters, you shouldn’t be asking the question – the contrast should hit you in the back of the neck. But in the appropriate circumstances, it’s a useful measure in its own right and can point you in the next direction you want to examine.
2. Content analysis of constructs.
The practice session on relationships ought to have given you an insight into the importance of analysing the actual content of the constructs, especially if you made the opportunity to interview one or two other people as well as yourself. Did you notice any particular themes emerging? and did you extract different themes from different people? I’d be very surprised if you didn’t – if not in the first round of constructs, then at the point when you started laddering up.
Remember, the Grid interview lets you eavesdrop on the language your subject has developed in order to navigate their way around the world. So if your subject felt that they’d had their trust broken rather too often, and perhaps found it hard to judge whether someone was trustworthy, you’d expect a lot of constructs that related to how trustworthy their people were. I’ve conducted interviews in which money and worldly success accounted for a good half of the subject’s constructs, and interviews where these didn’t figure at all; interviews in which religious belief and practice were important, and interviews where religion got no mention, and so on.
Again, before you think about analysing the results, you need to be certain that you’ve given the available constructs the best chance of coming to the surface (and I’ll say more about this in a later posting) and you should look for broad themes rather than fine distinctions.
I frequently use content analysis of constructs in projects where a group of people will be interviewed and their results pooled. Mostly I’ll be working on an organisation change project, where the first task is to determine the present culture of the organisation – in order to ask the question ‘how does it need to change?’ Mostly I’ll be asking managers to give me constructs about their colleagues and subordinates (whose identities are kept anonymous – I’m only interested in the constructs). I showed you a number of examples of this sort of study in the third posting, so I’ll not repeat myself here. What I do need to say is that when you’re doing a content analysis of the constructs, one of the most important skills to develop is that of recognising what’s been left out – observe that money hasn’t been mentioned in the constructs about your relationships ... observe that none of your managers mention innovation when thinking about their colleagues ... etc. Unfortunately there isn’t a Universal Directory of Constructs where you could look up the answer to the ‘what’s missing?’ question – though I will try to help you where I can – but let me say that if you’re aware of the need to develop this skill, and you practice before going ‘live’ on a new topic, then the skill usually develops at a good deliberate speed. (The only circumstances where it won’t are if the interviewer doesn’t listen; Grid interviewing is a great way to improve one’s listening skills).
3. Responses to Element Creation Questions:
Remember the example of using Grid to examine the reasons why doctors chose their specialties? There I used a set of element creation questions – asking for preferred and non-preferred specialties, etc. – and there were patterns in the answers to those questions, patterns which could themselves be analysed for useful information before we even got to construct elicitation. That’s one example of an application where the ‘beef’ begins to emerge in the very first stage of the interview.
The third practice session I gave you – on motivation, where you were asked to think about the high points and the down bits and the plateau times – was an example of what we call an unrehearsed element set. That is, you’re asking questions which most people may not formally have asked themselves before, and it’s unlikely that the responses will come tripping off the subject’s tongue. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been asked to draw an ‘emotional graph’ of your life-span, with its ups and downs – that’s a technique often used in counselling, and just looking at the highs and lows can be instructive even before you start asking for the reasons.
As a rough generalisation, unrehearsed element sets are more likely to be events or activities than things or people; usually, we’ve thought about the people in our lives and many of the ‘things’ that we have to choose between, so the ‘beef’ comes when you start to elicit constructs, or when you go on to laddering – or maybe even later. When you’ve had more practice in designing Grid sessions, I hope you’ll come to realise that many interview purposes can be achieved in two or three different ways, with different element sets: for example, you can do a very interesting ‘help me choose a car’ interview by creating element creation questions that single out various kinds of ‘critical incident’ while driving – now there’s an unrehearsed element set for almost anyone except a driving instructor, and if you feel like some more homework why not give that a try?
4. Using the constructs to create some new elements.
If you go back to the constructs you obtained in the career choice exercise, you could start to draw a profile of MY IDEAL CAREER or THE CAREER MOST LIKELY TO PROVE DISASTROUS, by deciding which pole of each construct you prefer and how strongly you feel about it. Then you’re part-way to preparing an aide-memoire to help you – or your interviewee – ask useful questions about potential job choices, or to understand why you might feel like a square peg in a round hole if you’re unhappy in the present job.
If you’d like to try something potentially more powerful, more rewarding, go back to your session on relationships and use the constructs to create some new elements. For example, if you’re in the habit of falling for people who turn out to be bad for you, try creating and rating the element I FALL FOR AND IT ENDS IN TEARS, or however you feel like phrasing it … one woman who did this had a huge Aha! moment and I realised that I had a habit of falling for the lonely hero whom only I could understand and accompany on his quest, but when the chips were down I’d be pushed aside … I require the Universe to bring me a thoughtful pipe-smoking historian who’ll absolutely adore me. Or there was the chap who realised that I keep falling for women who like being spoiled, treated with old-fashioned courtesy, made a fuss of … except that there are times when I want to be spoiled and given a treat, and it didn’t happen.
Experiment with various ‘created’ elements, getting a sense of how to create an element or elements that will be informative – for example:
WHAT S/HE SEEMED LIKE WHEN WE MET and WHAT S/HE SEEMED LIKE WHEN WE PARTED (where s/he represents a special relationship that went wrong);
MY IDEAL RELATIONSHIP;
THE RELATIONSHIP MY PARENTS WANT ME TO HAVE;
and so on. I’ll say more about creating elements part-way through in a later posting. I want to finish by raising a question, thus:
Who’s doing the analysis anyway?
So far, I’ve rather given the impression that the interviewer also does the analysis – look at what’s been generated in the interview and draw some conclusions from it. In fact, it’s much better if the interviewee is involved in the analysis also: better for the interviewee’s comfort, better for their trust in the process, but – crucially – because it’s their information they’ve generated and they’re interested in it, maybe more likely to see what’s important, to get involved. In fact, there’s a cardinal rule in good grid practice: Don’t construe other people’s construing, meaning ‘don’t you go drawing conclusions from the results – ask your interviewee.’ I’ll talk some more about feedback, ownership, and interviewee involvement in the next post – for the moment, may I just plant the seed that Grid isn’t something you do to people, it’s something you do with people.
Love,
Valerie.
Thursday 25 March 2010
Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Sixth, Getting Personal.
Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Sixth: Getting Personal.
The previous posts have been, inevitably, somewhat procedure-heavy. By now you should have a reasonable working knowledge of constructs and how to elicit them, laddering up to move towards core constructs, laddering down to move towards constructs that are less abstract and more operational; you’ve been introduced to elements, which are concrete representations of the domain you want to explore; how to create a good element set and the different options open to you; and the importance of having a purpose for your Grid session. You’ve come a long way, baby …
I think it might be a good idea to use this posting to offer you some examples of sessions that you can do with yourself, or with someone else, for purposes that offer the opportunity to gain important insights into topics that could matter to you personally. Also these sessions should develop your listening skills, and help you move from seeing Grid as a procedure towards using it as a structured conversation. I’ve also left a few questions unanswered – because I want you to feel the questions develop and to look inside yourself for the answers. (I don’t want you to just learn a procedure – I want you to achieve creative mastery of Repertory Grid and to grow your other skills as well).
One tip: I suggest that you use nine elements (because you can present the triads as 123, 456, 789, 147, and so on) and after you’ve got your nine elements on their separate cards, then shuffle the cards and number them after shuffling. This destroys any order effect, and it can be very useful later – see some of the later posts, where I give examples that use real people as elements but they need to be anonymous.
Please don’t forget to write each element on a separate card, and to place the group of three in front of your subject and physically shuffle them, two-against-one. (You may find yourself inventing new ways of phrasing the two-against-one question … just don’t suggest any of the content).
And don’t forget to ladder up and down. I’d like you to get a sense of when it’s appropriate to do some laddering, so I’m not going to suggest when you should do it; I’ll just say that it’s very, very rare to start laddering the first time you’re given a construct, nor do you have to wait until your subject is exhausted and seems to have run out of constructs.
A. Career Choice:
This is a useful session for anyone contemplating their choice of career – teenagers, people returning after a career break, people who’ve had a choice of careers forced upon them by redundancy, etc.
You should use element creation questions, and (unless the question states otherwise) the answers should be jobs that your subject might realistically expect to be within their range. If your subject wants to give the same answer to more than one question, re-phrase the question slightly so that you get a different answer.
1. Name a job that you’d really like to do;
2. And another one that you’d really like;
3. Now name one that you’d really dislike;
4. Your best friend’s job;
5. A job you’d like to do if money, qualifications, location, etc., were no object;
6. Another job you’d dislike;
7. Another job you’re familiar with;
8. Your present/most recent job (if applicable);
9. Your first job (if applicable);
(If the subject can’t answer 8 or 9, ask them to name two other jobs that they’ve been thinking about).
Then ask your construct creation questions thus:
Can you tell me something that any two of these have got in common that makes them different from the third, in terms of the knowledge and skills they need? and
… in terms of how you feel about them? and
… in terms of anything else that’s important to you?
B. Exploring Relationships:
Warning: this application of Grid gets in very deep very quickly. Don’t you dare do it with anyone else unless (i) you’ve first done it with yourself, and (ii) you really do have their permission to probe the depths of their personal history.
The purpose of this session is to gain insight into the reasons why some of the subject’s intimate relationships have been successful and some less so, with the overall aim of helping the subject try to make more informed choices in the future. You can use friends as elements, or people with whom the subject has had – or wanted to have – a romantic attachment, but don’t mix the two. By the way, I’ve used the word ‘lover’ in the element creation questions, but you might make a tactful enquiry about the most appropriate term for your subject.
Here’s a suggested element set:
1. Your current/most recent lover;
2. Your first lover;
3. A lover who hurt you badly;
4. Someone you know whom you’d have liked to have for a lover but didn’t;
5. Another lover with whom it didn’t work out;
6. Someone you know who wanted you as a lover but you didn’t fancy;
7, 8, 9. Now give me three more names of people who’ve played a significant part in your romantic life.
And the magic question:
Can you tell me how any two of these are like each other and different from the third, in terms of how they behaved towards you … and in terms of how you behaved towards them … and in terms of how you felt about them … and in terms of anything else that’s important to you?
C. Exploring Motivation:
This session can be used for a variety of purposes. The elements are events in the subject’s life – times where they’ve felt they’re on top form, times when they’ve hit a flat patch, times when they’ve been coasting, etc. Sometimes I’ve used this session to help the person make a career choice, reasoning that if they can identify the characteristics of the times when they’ve been on top form it would be a good idea to choose a career that offers more of these opportunities. At other times I’ve use it to help someone who’s hit a flat patch – maybe even sunk into a depression – and they find it helps to revisit the times when they have felt good about themselves and then we can talk about ways of trying to get more of the good times and fewer grotty ones.
Again, you’ll be using element creation questions, but this time you’re asking for events – actual times in the person’s life. And you need to have these events be as concrete, as time-bound, as possible. So, practice some phrases like ‘what could you have caught on film with a camera?’ and even ‘what could you post on YouTube to show this?’ So if your subject says ‘I was good at athletics,’ you need to make this more concrete: ‘And what would you post on YouTube to illustrate this?’ because you need an answer like ‘Winning the 800-metre hurdles when I was seventeen.’
Also, it’s a good idea to ask your subject to think about the whole of their adult life when they’re answering the questions, rather than concentrating on a particular period. Sometimes, with adults in mid-life, I’ve asked them to think of two or three elements from each decade. See how you get on:
Here’s the suggested element creation questions:
1. Name an event in your life when you felt that you were really achieving, performing at your peak;
2. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;
3. Name an event when you were afraid that you were about to fail, or failing;
4. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;
5. Name an event when you were doing OK, but you weren’t really being challenged;
6. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;
7. One more event when you felt you were on top form;
8. One more event when you felt afraid of failing;
9. Finally, one more event that will help give a representative snapshot of the high and not-so-high spots on your life.
And your ‘in terms of’ questions:
in terms of my skills and experience; in terms of the relationships involved; in terms of the type of challenge they presented; and in terms of anything else that seems important to you.
When you’ve practised these sessions, I’ve got two more questions for you:
1. What can you learn from the results?
and
2. if you feel like it, try designing your own session and tell me about it by posting a comment to the blog. The door’s always open, of course, but I’d be very happy to hear about what you plan to do, or what you’ve tried and how it’s worked out.
Good luck,
Valerie.
The previous posts have been, inevitably, somewhat procedure-heavy. By now you should have a reasonable working knowledge of constructs and how to elicit them, laddering up to move towards core constructs, laddering down to move towards constructs that are less abstract and more operational; you’ve been introduced to elements, which are concrete representations of the domain you want to explore; how to create a good element set and the different options open to you; and the importance of having a purpose for your Grid session. You’ve come a long way, baby …
I think it might be a good idea to use this posting to offer you some examples of sessions that you can do with yourself, or with someone else, for purposes that offer the opportunity to gain important insights into topics that could matter to you personally. Also these sessions should develop your listening skills, and help you move from seeing Grid as a procedure towards using it as a structured conversation. I’ve also left a few questions unanswered – because I want you to feel the questions develop and to look inside yourself for the answers. (I don’t want you to just learn a procedure – I want you to achieve creative mastery of Repertory Grid and to grow your other skills as well).
One tip: I suggest that you use nine elements (because you can present the triads as 123, 456, 789, 147, and so on) and after you’ve got your nine elements on their separate cards, then shuffle the cards and number them after shuffling. This destroys any order effect, and it can be very useful later – see some of the later posts, where I give examples that use real people as elements but they need to be anonymous.
Please don’t forget to write each element on a separate card, and to place the group of three in front of your subject and physically shuffle them, two-against-one. (You may find yourself inventing new ways of phrasing the two-against-one question … just don’t suggest any of the content).
And don’t forget to ladder up and down. I’d like you to get a sense of when it’s appropriate to do some laddering, so I’m not going to suggest when you should do it; I’ll just say that it’s very, very rare to start laddering the first time you’re given a construct, nor do you have to wait until your subject is exhausted and seems to have run out of constructs.
A. Career Choice:
This is a useful session for anyone contemplating their choice of career – teenagers, people returning after a career break, people who’ve had a choice of careers forced upon them by redundancy, etc.
You should use element creation questions, and (unless the question states otherwise) the answers should be jobs that your subject might realistically expect to be within their range. If your subject wants to give the same answer to more than one question, re-phrase the question slightly so that you get a different answer.
1. Name a job that you’d really like to do;
2. And another one that you’d really like;
3. Now name one that you’d really dislike;
4. Your best friend’s job;
5. A job you’d like to do if money, qualifications, location, etc., were no object;
6. Another job you’d dislike;
7. Another job you’re familiar with;
8. Your present/most recent job (if applicable);
9. Your first job (if applicable);
(If the subject can’t answer 8 or 9, ask them to name two other jobs that they’ve been thinking about).
Then ask your construct creation questions thus:
Can you tell me something that any two of these have got in common that makes them different from the third, in terms of the knowledge and skills they need? and
… in terms of how you feel about them? and
… in terms of anything else that’s important to you?
B. Exploring Relationships:
Warning: this application of Grid gets in very deep very quickly. Don’t you dare do it with anyone else unless (i) you’ve first done it with yourself, and (ii) you really do have their permission to probe the depths of their personal history.
The purpose of this session is to gain insight into the reasons why some of the subject’s intimate relationships have been successful and some less so, with the overall aim of helping the subject try to make more informed choices in the future. You can use friends as elements, or people with whom the subject has had – or wanted to have – a romantic attachment, but don’t mix the two. By the way, I’ve used the word ‘lover’ in the element creation questions, but you might make a tactful enquiry about the most appropriate term for your subject.
Here’s a suggested element set:
1. Your current/most recent lover;
2. Your first lover;
3. A lover who hurt you badly;
4. Someone you know whom you’d have liked to have for a lover but didn’t;
5. Another lover with whom it didn’t work out;
6. Someone you know who wanted you as a lover but you didn’t fancy;
7, 8, 9. Now give me three more names of people who’ve played a significant part in your romantic life.
And the magic question:
Can you tell me how any two of these are like each other and different from the third, in terms of how they behaved towards you … and in terms of how you behaved towards them … and in terms of how you felt about them … and in terms of anything else that’s important to you?
C. Exploring Motivation:
This session can be used for a variety of purposes. The elements are events in the subject’s life – times where they’ve felt they’re on top form, times when they’ve hit a flat patch, times when they’ve been coasting, etc. Sometimes I’ve used this session to help the person make a career choice, reasoning that if they can identify the characteristics of the times when they’ve been on top form it would be a good idea to choose a career that offers more of these opportunities. At other times I’ve use it to help someone who’s hit a flat patch – maybe even sunk into a depression – and they find it helps to revisit the times when they have felt good about themselves and then we can talk about ways of trying to get more of the good times and fewer grotty ones.
Again, you’ll be using element creation questions, but this time you’re asking for events – actual times in the person’s life. And you need to have these events be as concrete, as time-bound, as possible. So, practice some phrases like ‘what could you have caught on film with a camera?’ and even ‘what could you post on YouTube to show this?’ So if your subject says ‘I was good at athletics,’ you need to make this more concrete: ‘And what would you post on YouTube to illustrate this?’ because you need an answer like ‘Winning the 800-metre hurdles when I was seventeen.’
Also, it’s a good idea to ask your subject to think about the whole of their adult life when they’re answering the questions, rather than concentrating on a particular period. Sometimes, with adults in mid-life, I’ve asked them to think of two or three elements from each decade. See how you get on:
Here’s the suggested element creation questions:
1. Name an event in your life when you felt that you were really achieving, performing at your peak;
2. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;
3. Name an event when you were afraid that you were about to fail, or failing;
4. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;
5. Name an event when you were doing OK, but you weren’t really being challenged;
6. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;
7. One more event when you felt you were on top form;
8. One more event when you felt afraid of failing;
9. Finally, one more event that will help give a representative snapshot of the high and not-so-high spots on your life.
And your ‘in terms of’ questions:
in terms of my skills and experience; in terms of the relationships involved; in terms of the type of challenge they presented; and in terms of anything else that seems important to you.
When you’ve practised these sessions, I’ve got two more questions for you:
1. What can you learn from the results?
and
2. if you feel like it, try designing your own session and tell me about it by posting a comment to the blog. The door’s always open, of course, but I’d be very happy to hear about what you plan to do, or what you’ve tried and how it’s worked out.
Good luck,
Valerie.
Wednesday 24 March 2010
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.
Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Fourth, on Elements,
Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Fourth: Working with Elements (One).
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.
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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