Jankowitcz D. - Easy Guide to Repertory Grids (2004)(en)

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Kelly felt that thiswas soimportant that he built it into histheoryas a formal statement. Fora list of these see Appendix 6.His Sociality Corollary states:‘To the extent that one person construes the construction process of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person.’ Role relationships, he’s saying (such as the relationship between a learner and a teacher; an employee and the owner of the firm; a person and his or her partner), depend for their success on the extent to which each person can see events of mutual importance through the other person’s eyes.

This may seem obvious ^ until you realise what Kelly is not saying. Successful role relationships do not necessarily depend on people seeing the world (construing the meaning of events) in the same way. We don’t have to have the same constructs as other people to relate to them effectively. All that’s required is that we learn a little about their constructs, especially those which result in them seeing the same events differently to ourselves.

There’s one exception.In those close situationsin which the other person’s constructs matter to us because they help to confirm how we think about ourselves (as in friendship formation, therapy, and marriage), having some shared constructs helps (Duck,1973; Neimeyer & Neimeyer,1985; Leitner & Pfenninger,1994).

That apart, we can relate effectively even though our constructs differ (so long as we know this), and to the extent that we know what the other person’s constructs are.

There are several ways in which you can use a grid to check your own attempts at sociality through observation, and the main procedure is described in Section 9.2.3.

People vary in how well they can put themselves in other people’s shoes. Sometimes, the very pressure of events prevents you from getting a good ‘fix’ on the other person. A good way of creating the space in which to understand the other person’s constructs, without going to the formal extent of a repertory grid, is by asking them to tell you a story about themselves (Mair, 1989, 1990).

4.3.2 Storytelling

Self-Characterisation

Self-characterisation technique requires the interviewee to write about himor herself. The interviewee provides a character sketch, usually written in the third person as if s/he were describing someone else. The interviewee is encouraged to be explicit, but also to regard the task as a pleasant one rather than a clinical dissection, by being asked to write ‘just as if he were the principal character in a play . . . as it might be written by a friend who knew him very intimately and very sympathetically, perhaps better than anyone ever really could know him’ Kelly (1955/1991: 323).

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The character sketch, which should be longer than just a few sentences, is then analysed, preferably in collaboration with the interviewee, to identify the themes, traits, and personal characteristics which the interviewee has attributed to himor herself; the constructs, in other words, which s/he has about himor herself. The picture you obtain can then be triangulated with a conventional grid for a more comprehensive account of the individual in the context of a given topic.

Characterising Others

It is also possible to provide characterisations of other people. The ‘child characterisation sketch’ relies on tape recordings rather than requiring a written account, and invites one person (in this case, a child’s parent) to talk genuinely and thoughtfully about another person (the child). The elicitation starts by asking the parent to describe the personality of the child as completely as possible. The people who developed it (Davis et al., 1989) suggest that the interviewer should start the interview somewhat conventionally before introducing the technique to the interviewee. In Section 3.1.1, you’ll recall that I emphasised the importance of a variety of process issues, including making the interviewee feel at ease. However you do it, using a grid or not, construct elicitation involves procedures which are unfamiliar to most interviewees, who need help in being eased into them.

The developers also suggest that, with this kind of topic, interruptions to clarify what is meant or to provide greater precision are by and large unnecessary! Analysis involves listing the different kinds of constructs which emerge from the description of the child, classifying them according to their emergent poles. Implicit poles can be identified in subsequent discussion (and here the authors and I part company: I would argue that they have to be, and preferably during elicitation) and ratings provided. However, useful information can be obtained without rating the elements on the constructs.

Notice what’s happening. The most common way of eliciting constructs is by means of the triadic procedure. (‘In what way do two of these differ from the third?’) And you’ve seen that it’s possible to use just two elements (the dyadic procedure) in certain circumstances. You can think of the child characterisation sketch, and indeed self-characterisation technique, as ways of identifying constructs using just one element! ‘Monadic’ procedures, in fact.

Other Monadic Procedures

If you want to find out about a person’s central values, and the constructs s/he feels are particularly important, you can ask the interviewee to tell you about

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him-/herself using just one, vivid and dramatic, situation as the element: the monadic statement.

For example, if you had a choice about it, what would you like to see written on your tombstone? And can you think of a statement which is the opposite of that one? The answer to these two questions would be a construct which said something, possibly profound, about your own views of yourself!

Other possible monadic statements listed by Epting et al. (1993) in describing some of the work of Leitner (who invented this technique) are as follows:

(a)Please describe your conception of God.

(b)Please list your earliest memories.

(c)What have been your most significant (life-turning) events?

(d)Do you have dreams which deal in the same theme? What is it?

Epting’s article is worth looking at in detail if you’re seeking further ways of identifying constructs, both grid and non-grid based.

4.3.3 Non-Verbal Techniques?

The grid itself, and the other techniques for eliciting constructs described above, all depend on words. In that sense, they require a reasonably articulate interviewee. But do you remember the definition of a construct given in Section 2.1.1?: ‘Constructs are contrasts we devise when dealing with the world, in order to understand it.’

And, while they’re commonly communicated in words – and we’ve got used to thinking of constructs as spoken or written pairs of single words, or phrases

– it’s the actual distinctions a person recognises and makes that are the constructs, and not the words in which these distinctions are expressed. Constructs in themselves are non-verbal.

Try me out. Do constructs exist before the words in which they’re expressed?

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Ask your interviewee to provide a set of objects (the real thing where practical; otherwise, a photograph of them) to act as elements. Next, ask the interviewee to group them (into two that are the same and one that is different, or place them into subgroups, or simply to arrange them) in such a way as to signal what s/he thinks of them – what s/he wishes to ‘say’ about the objects, nonverbally, as clearly as possible.

For example, the objects may be photographs of paintings a person has seen. (Or pictures on cards, or samples of textured material. You might care to look up Neimeyer, 1981, if you want to try out the following example for real!) The photographs might be lined up in order of preference, a smile and a grimace providing information about which end of the construct applies to which end of the line of photographs.

And there you have it, in front of your very eyes and with nothing up my sleeve. You saw that the cards were arranged into a line according to that construct without words, and before your interviewee changed his or her facial expression. So, it’s possible to have constructs without words, or any other sort of symbolic expression.

Ah! But is it possible to communicate constructs without some form of symbolic expression? Well, no: notice the function of the smile and the grimace in hinting at what the construct might be, and for indicating which pole was preferred.

That’s fair enough: you can’t communicate without symbols. But before we go on, let’s examine that assumption about the need for symbolisation. Before the act of communication, is it possible to have constructs without relying on some form of symbol? Opinions differ on this. Some people point out that to construe is to differentiate (‘in what way are two the same and one different?’), and that differentiation involves choice, some of it deliberate and explicit, but some of it less so and without any symbols being involved. They argue that choice is defined as a selection between alternatives, and that selections can be made without awareness. The pupil of your eye dilates more when you see an attractive person than an unattractive one, for example, and this is an act of construing as much as if it were consciously and deliberately made. In linguistics, Saussure (1915/1983) provides an early, systematic exposition of the argument that it is simple contrast (between a sign and all the signs not beingused to expressthe thing being signified), bereft of deliberation, whichlies at the heart of meaning.

Otherswould suggest, in contrast, that symbolisation hasto exist before awareness.It is essential in order to engage in the organisation and reorganisation, called ‘information processing’, required for the processes of memorisation, storage, and recall.

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Something which represents an attractive face as distinct from an unattractive face has to be processed, or stored in memory, and what is that something other than a symbol? It certainly isn’t the face itself.

Both viewpoints would concede that, regardless of all this, attractiveness lies in the eye of the beholder and that all beholders differ in their experience! In other words, that what matters just as much in a representation is the background, history, and personality of the person making the distinction.

And both parties would certainly agree that the medium in which symbols are expressed need not be verbal. We’ve all encountered algebra; and those who are familiar with mathematical logic will be aware of other non-verbal symbol systems in which deduction, reasoning, and hence the recognition of similarities and contrasts, are possible.What’s being said, then, is that it’s certainly possible to have non-verbal constructs, but that the existence of some form of symbolsystem, verbalorotherwise, is essential for any work to be done.

Thank you! Now, to summarise all of that in practical terms. There’s no doubt that verbal symbolisation is particularly efficient. Also, non-verbal construing, as in the case of the photographs above, is only possible because the people doing the construing are old enough to have developed language already. This enables them to represent, or encode, the distinctions and similarities which make up a construct more effectively than if they’d never learnt a language.

Yes, that’s plausible. Kelly talked about pre-verbal construing in this exact sense. It is construing, it does occur, but it’s inchoate. It’s not expressed in consistent verbal symbols and is thereby ‘primitive’in nature (Kelly,1955/1991: 465).

Okay. Now, let’s go back to communication. In order to be sure about what the construct is, even if the interviewee has been proceeding without words, you have to question your interviewee. Suppose, for example, the photographs were arranged into two heaps which grouped the paintings as follows:

– but you’d need to ask, to be sure of it.

Any inferences about construing which you draw from your interviewee’s non-verbal behaviour (smiles, pauses, or looks of puzzlement or contentment, the significant twitches of the social process in which you’re engaged) need to be noted and checked. You’ll find more about the importance of process in analysis in Section 5.3.1, by the way.

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interviewee construes. The level depends very much on the topic, and why you’re both doing a grid. Attention to ensure this kind of specificity is particularly important

.if your topic is one about which people have ‘motherhoods’ and think in cliche´d terms

.if you are doing the grid interview as the qualitative phase of a market research study

.if you’re trying to identify faults in manufacturing or service provision in a quality-control context and discover, in detail, why a sample is or is not of acceptable quality.

At step 5, then, you always have a choice: whether to accept the construct as first offered, or whether to take and repeat step 6, looking for more detail. The procedure by which you do so is quite simple, and if you look again at the 10point procedure, or glance again at Exercise 4.1, you’ll see that what you’re doing, in effect, is adding an additional substep (call it step 6b) to step 6 of the procedure.

6b Put a ‘how’ question to the interviewee.

‘How can I tell?’ or ‘in what particular way?’ or ‘can you give me an example of the kind of thing you mean?’ about the emergent pole of the original construct. (When the elements are people, ‘what kind of person is like that?’ is a useful form of words.)

Write the answer down below the emergent pole of the original construct.

Put a ‘how’ question to the interviewee about the implicit pole of the original construct.

Write down the answer below the implicit pole of the original construct.

Stop at that point, or repeat the ‘how’ question in more detail still, about the construct you’ve just written down.

Apply the remaining steps of the basic grid procedure to the final construct you arrive at using step 6b, and not to the original one you obtained in step 5.

The result, if you were to write each step down before writing the final one into the grid, looks a little like a ladder – the contrasts provide us with the ‘rungs’, and the superordinate–subordinate relationships at each successive step constitute the ‘uprights’ of the ladder. See Figure 4.1. Hence the term, ‘laddering down’.

Figure 4.1 Laddering and pyramiding

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Rating the Laddered Construct in the Grid

At step 6 of the basic procedure, you would write down just the lowest construct you got to, on the grid sheet. You would then obtain the ratings of all the elements on this final version of the construct, following steps 7 to 9.

Since you have carried out Exercise 4.1 before getting to this point – you did do the exercise, didn’t you? – you’ll remember that three examples of laddering down occur: see pages 258, 261, 266 of Appendix 2, and refer to Appendix 1.2.

4.4.2 Pyramiding Technique

‘Hold on!’ you might argue. ‘When you’re laddering down, there is surely more than one way in which a person can answer that ‘how’ question!’

A person can feel comfortable with someone because the other would help in a crisis, or because the other never ever challenges things that the person says, or because the other person’s reaction to events always includes the funny side of those events – or, indeed, for a great variety of reasons. Why pick on a particular one to write down as the construct at step 6 of the procedure?

As with so much of grid technique, the answer is: it depends what you’re wanting to do! Why, in particular, are you interviewing the other person? The answer may relate to the topic of the grid, or to the circumstances in which the topic is being investigated. There are times when you’d want to identify constructs at a detailed level from a particular point of view, using the qualifying phrase technique described in Section 3.2.3. Here, you’d be content with a simple laddering procedure which expresses the construct most precisely from that point of view.

There are other times when you want to investigate the variety of a person’s construing – the range of a person’s points of view, if you like. For example, the grid may be about feelings towards people, and whether the interviewee feels comfortable with other people is just one thing you wish to learn about. Or the grid may be about what an interviewee understands by the idea of trusting other people – trust may be the topic – and you seek as many different aspects of that superordinate concept as possible. In this case, where you want to understand the range of a person’s construing, there is an alternative to laddering, called ‘pyramiding’.

The procedure is a little more involved than in laddering. (Refer to the lower half of Figure 4.1). Now add the following substep to step 6 of the basic 10point grid-elicitation procedure.