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

DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF A SINGLE REPERTORY GRID 89

Table 5.1 Characterising constructs

Construct		Type
Would require careful planning	– I could start without	Behavioural
of application form, reading	any special preparation
up on things
Requires dedication,	– Requires a cool head	Unremarkable?
commitment, heart
Not a bandwagon or a fashion:	– Just the current fashion,	Core construct
could really make a difference	may sound good but not
to other people who need me	really genuine
Men rarely do this	– Men as likely to do	Propositional.
	this as women	Might be useful in
		a counselling setting
Has its stresses; am a bit	– Any problems	Affective
nervous of it	encountered wouldn’t
	be stressful
My learning would be	– My learning would be	Attributional
through people who want	through people just doing
to help me	their own thing
Best for me in the long run	– Won’t do quite so much	Evaluative
	for me

The topic was ‘How I might spend the next year’, by a mature student with a general degree in psychology currently finishing a postgraduate diploma in education. He was particularly interested in what would be the best choice so far as his personal development was concerned. The elements were

. a year’s voluntary work

. a job in a secondary school

. register for an MPhil/PhD

. register for an MA in educational psychology

. look after their baby while his wife supported the family

and, given the developmental flavour to the grid, two self elements:

. me as I am now

. me as I intend to be.

of your own classification scheme as part of a technique called content analysis, described in detail in Section 7.2.

THINGS TO DO

Exercise 5.1 Practising Process Analysis

Look at the grid which you elicited when you did Exercise 3.2. Go through the process issues, under the headings of ‘topic’, ‘elements’, ‘constructs’, and

90 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

‘ratings’ described in Section 5.3.1, and try to remember anything which happened under these headings when you conducted that interview.

.How many of these involved procedural mistakes on your part? Don’t worry if there were a lot of those. You improve with practice!

.How many issues can you remember? Probably not many, particularly if your first grid was some time ago.

.If you can, talk to the colleague from whom you elicited that grid. Can s/he help you to remember anything else that’s worth noting about the process?

Remember: process analysis needs doing soon after the grid was elicited. If you don’t plan to do any further analysis for a while (perhaps because you’re doing a series of grid interviews), it’s useful to make notes of your impressions of the process shortly after the interview took place. And, unless there is some special reason why you can’t, always consider discussing your process impressions with the interviewee.

Now return to Section 5.3.2 and carry on reading.

Exercise 5.2 Practising Eyeball Analysis and

Construct Categorisation

Working with the grid in Appendix 2 (the one you used for Exercise 4.1), carry out an eyeball analysis; in other words, answer the following questions:

(a)What the interviewee is thinking about:

. How did the interviewer negotiate the topic with the interviewee?

. What was the qualifying statement?

(b)How the interviewee represented the topic:

. What were the elements?

. How were they agreed?

(c)How does the interviewee think?

. What are the constructs?

(d)What does the interviewee think?

. What kind of scale is used, and how would you characterise the ratings?

(e)Look at the supplied elements and constructs

. At an initial glance, which element seems as though it received the most similar ratings to the supplied element?

DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF A SINGLE REPERTORY GRID 91

.Similarly, form a quick impression of which construct seems to have received the most similar ratings to the supplied construct.

(f)Draw your conclusions

.What are the main points, bearing in mind any process analysis you have already conducted?

Now check your answers and reasoning in

Appendix 1.4.

Exercise 5.3 Characterising Constructs

Glance again at the grid produced in Appendix 2. How would you characterise the constructs? Which would you want to explore in more detail with the interviewee because they appear to be

(a)core

(b)propositional

(c)affective

(d)evaluative

(e)attributional?

Now check your impressions in Appendix 1.5.

THINGS TO READ

Now that you have a good feel for the repertory grid, how it’s elicited, and how to appreciate, in some depth, the meanings it conveys, it might be a good point to take in a little more theory. I suggest that the most valuable activity at this stage would be to go outside the field of personal construct psychology, and read what some other people of a constructivist inclination have to say about how people construe and, in particular, how they come to share constructions of their experience.

.Berger, P.L. & Luckmann, T. (1976) The Social Nature of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

92 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

One field in which process analysis is important is personal counselling and guidance. The following is directly relevant as an example of professional practice.

.Jankowicz, A.D. & Cooper, K. (1982) ‘The use of focused repertory grids in counselling’. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 10, 136–150.

It would also serve to show how approaches from personal construct psychology are relevant to the process work done by OD consultants and anyone taking an action learning approach to organisation development.

CHAPTER 6

ANALYSING RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN A SINGLE GRID

6.1 Simple Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

6.2 Cluster Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

6.3 Principal Components Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

6.4 Concluding Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Things to Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

Things to Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

In this chapter, we concentrate on the relationships within a grid, and assess them systematically. It’s the longest chapter in this guidebook, but the procedures it describes are very straightforward, depending mostly on simple addition and subtraction. Simplifying analysis in this way makes for a longer account, as I explain it all, but once you’ve gone through this chapter, you’ll simply fly through the procedures. Ferrets, drainpipes, and doses of salts spring to mind.

Chapter 5 dealt mainly with the analysis of content; there wasn’t a lot there about structure. In contrast, Chapter 6 deals with structure, and this requires us to look at the relationships among the elements and the constructs in a person’s grid.

We’ll be sitting back from the immediacy of grid elicitation, and dealing with things which aren’t obvious at first glance. Along the way, we’ll be returning to the informal impressions about a person’s construct structure that will have occurred to you during the grid interview, and examining them systematically. You have at your disposal:

. simple relationships between elements

. simple relationships between constructs

94 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

. cluster analysis

. principal components analysis.

In the first two of these, once the relationships and links you identify have been pointed out to the interviewee, s/he will recognise them as a fairly direct outcome of what s/he had in mind when s/he was providing the ratings; or, at least, as implied, fairly directly, by those ratings. There is a sense of ownership.

In the last two, that sense of ownership may not be there, unless your interviewee understands the statistical manipulations involved in cluster and principal components analysis, or can follow the explanations which you provide. You’ll need to draw on your own understanding of these procedures to discuss how the links you have identified necessarily follow. My objective in the relevant section is, in part, to provide that understanding painlessly, and without involving you in particularly deep statistical reasoning.

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, I try to appeal to your intuition as much as to any great degree of developed numeracy (a quality which is, at times, rather overrated). In these circumstances, people who are comfortable with numbers may find what follows to be rather basic and ploddy. Please bear with me, since I want to take all my readers with me on what is a fascinating journey. (And forgive any comments which strike you as gross oversimplifications.) There again, this approach also means that people who aren’t naturally comfortable with statistical analysis will need to take some of what I say on trust.

I’ll try to keep the latter to a minimum. In fact, there’s really just the one thing I ask you to accept ‘because I say so’.

In dealing with simple relationships, between elements or between constructs, you’re dealing with the ratings directly, and your interpretation of the numbers is very straightforward, based on the notion that a rating of ‘1’ defines the emergent pole and a rating of ‘5’ (or ‘7’, on a 7-point scale) defines the implicit pole. In these circumstances, there’s no limit on the size of grid to work with. A grid with three elements and two constructs may not tell you a lot, but the same analytic procedures apply as with a grid of, say, 20 elements and 15 constructs, and your analysis is capable of making as much, or as little, sense of either.

With the other two kinds of analysis (cluster analysis and principal components analysis), you use procedures which depend on additional assumptions about the meanings attached to the numbers you’re using, and, as a general rule, you shouldn’t use them unless your grid has at least six elements and six constructs. (Some would argue that you shouldn’t use principal components analysis at all unless you have 50 constructs; but I feel that that is an excessively stringent requirement.)

ANALYSING RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN A SINGLE GRID 95

Finally, you’ll notice that these last two procedures rely on a software package, about which I’ve relatively little to say, my concern being to help you to understand the output of any such package without wedding you to any particular one. There are many purpose-built repertory grid packages available, some reviewed in detail in Sewell et al. (1992), and others more briefly, but more recently and with good access information, in Scheer (2003). If you know your way round it, you can, of course, use any general-purpose statistical package for cluster and principal components analyses of repertory grids; Scheer (2003) provides you with a way of accessing some notes by Richard Bell on how to use SPSS for this purpose.

If you prefer to have some software available to you right now, as you work through Sections 6.2 and 6.3, you will find the following website very useful: http://tiger.cpsc.ucalgary.ca:1500/ It’s the location of WEBGRID, a platformindependent package which will

. elicit a grid

. allow you to enter the details of an existing grid for detailed analysis

. provide you with a cluster analysis (discussed in Section 6.2 below)

.provide you with a principal components analysis (discussed in Section 6.3 below). (Note that the package uses the term ‘map’ in place of the term ‘principal components analysis’, in case you’re wondering where to find it.)

This package really is a remarkable achievement, since it does its job for you regardless of what type of computer you run, and regardless of where in the world you’re located. You can save grid data on the server under perfectly secure conditions, accessible from anywhere; and it won’t cost you a penny or a cent! Further particulars are also at http://repgrid.com/.

6.1 SIMPLE RELATIONSHIPS

By the time you have thought over the process by which the grid you’re analysing was elicited, carried out an eyeball inspection of the grid, and developed a feeling for the kinds of construct being used, you will probably be noticing relationships within the grid. Some elements seem to have received rather similar ratings on the various constructs, while others were construed very differently. Perhaps there are constructs on which the ratings are practically identical across all the elements, as if the constructs were expressing similar meanings. You may have noticed that the presence of certain kinds of construct precludes others (pre-emptive), or appears to make others easier for the interviewee to offer (constellatory).

96 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

Let’s take this in two stages. Firstly, using as an example an extract from a grid about training officers, let’s examine relationships between elements. Secondly, let’s examine relationships between constructs, illustrating the procedure with a grid showing the ways in which a department store manager views her sales staff.

6.1.1 Simple Relationships Between Elements

You would carry out analyses of element relationships if you:

. didn’t have access to a computer for more detailed analyses

. didn’t understand heavy statistics but are happy to do some simple counting

.wanted to continue the analysis in a collaborative style with your interviewee

.were using the grid as part of a counselling or personal development interview

. were using the grid as a simple decision-making device.

When you carried out your eyeball analysis (Section 5.3.2), you did an examination of the ratings of elements on constructs as a way of identifying what the interviewee thinks. It is a natural next step to ask whether the interviewee thinks of one element in the same way as s/he thinks of another.

How would you tell? Glance for a moment at Table 6.1. It summarises the ways in which a training officer thinks of other trainers he has known. Do an instant eyeball analysis to familiarise yourself with the content of this grid. Now, focusing on the elements, which two look as though they’re construed in much the same way by the interviewee?

It looks like trainer 1 and trainer 3 (T1 and T3). Now, how did you arrive at that answer? Think about it: what did you actually do? Another way of putting it: if you had to tell someone else how to arrive at that answer, what is the procedure you would ask him or her to follow?

‘What did I do? Well, I could see that the ratings for T1 and T3, reading down those two columns, were practically identical, which wasn’t the case with the other elements. There was practically no difference between them.’

Exactly so: you focused on differences, and the procedure involved in simple element relationship analysis is straightforward. It’s a matter of summing differences and comparing the outcomes, as follows.

(1) Calculate differences in ratings on the first pair of elements on the first construct. Take element 1 and element 2 (column 1 and column 2). Find the

ANALYSING RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN A SINGLE GRID 97

Table 6.1 An extract from a grid interview with a young training officer on ‘trainers I have known’

1	T1	T2	T3	T4	Self	5
Prepares thoroughly	5	2	5	3	2	Seat-of-pants speaker
Energetic, moves about	1	2	1	5	1	Just stands there stolidly
Intellectual	3	1	3	5	2	Pedestrian
Language articulate, precise,	5	1	4	2	3	Language shambolic,
and concise						appeals to intuition
Makes it seem so obvious	3	1	2	5	3	You have to work to
and clear						understand his point
Tells jokes	1	5	2	4	3	Takes it all very seriously
Overall, enjoyed his courses	1	3	2	5	2	Overall, didn’t enjoy his
						courses

absolute difference between the two ratings on the first construct (that is, take the smaller rating from the larger regardless of which element has the larger, and which the smaller, rating).

(2)Summing down the page. Do the same on the second, and subsequent, constructs, systematically down the page, summing the differences as you go. Jot this total down when you’ve finished.

(3)Repeat for all pairs of elements. Now repeat for columns 1 and 3, 1 and 4 . . . 2 and 3, 2 and 4 . . . etc., noting down the sums of differences as you go.

(4)Compare these sums of differences. The smallest difference, indicating the two elements which are construed most similarly, and the largest difference, indicating the two elements which are construed as most dissimilar, are particularly useful to examine.

Glance again at Table 6.1. Trainers 1 and 3 are construed the most similarly: both ‘seat-of-pants’ rather than careful preparers (5–5); both ‘energetic’ (1–1); both halfway between having an ‘intellectual’ rather than ‘pedestrian’ style (3–3); trainer 1 being ‘shambolic’ in his presentation, a little more so than trainer 3 (5–4); trainer 3 being slightly more, but not extremely, ‘clear and obvious’ compared with trainer 1 (2–3); both inclined to ‘tell jokes’ but T1 more than T3 (1–2); and both receiving similar ratings on the ‘overall’ supplied construct (1–2). These differences (and remember, we’re taking the absolute value each time, subtracting the smaller from the larger) sum to 4.

Repeat this for all the other pairings, and you see that no other elements are as close to one another as those two. T3 and Self are the next most alike (a sum of differences of 7), while T1 and T4 are the least alike, with a sum of differences of 20.

98 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

Go on: check it for yourself by doing

Exercise 6.1.

The next step is highly recommended if you’re working collaboratively with the interviewee.

(5) Discuss these relationships with the interviewee. The grid used in this example was a very simple one. The interviewee would easily be able to see what s/he said as you fed it back, pointing to the two columns of the grid. If the relationship isn’t obvious in a larger and more complicated grid, simply repeating the rationale about finding the smallest sum of differences to your interviewee, and running through an example as under step 4 above, should be sufficient.

At that point, your conversation with the interviewee will depend on your purpose in eliciting the grid, but will also depend on the extent to which the interviewee is interested, intrigued, and possibly surprised by the information about the relationships among the elements. It shouldn’t come as an enormous surprise, by the way: at the most, an ‘ooh yes’ response, ‘I hadn’t noticed that before, but now that you point it out I can see that’, or words to that effect. Much of the time you’ll be confirming what’s known already.

The interviewee should have a sense of ownership of what you’re pointing out. And if s/he doesn’t – if s/he doesn’t recognise, or disowns, the relationship – then you may wish to explore the apparent disparity between your analysis and the interviewee’s own view, in greater detail. (The chances are that you haven’t yet elicited some fairly important constructs, on which the interviewee would rate the two elements very differently.) Next,

(6) Examine relationships with supplied elements, if any. These will most commonly be

.relationships between any ‘self’ element and the other elements. This helps to answer the question, ‘Who do you see as most similar to yourself?’

.relationships between any ‘self’ element and any ‘ideal self’ element. How close is the interviewee to his or her ideal? This approach is often used when measuring change, or assisting the interviewee in clarifying his or her thoughts about some possible change. The applicability to counselling is obvious.

These are two much-researched fields, and if your work in construct elicitation has an advisory, guidance, or counselling element, you may want to familiarise yourself with some of this research. Probably the best place to start is Winter (1992). If you look at page 42, for example, you’ll see nine different measures of self-construing listed, some of which require you to do more complex structural analyses (see Section 6.2 below). Others, however, like the Self ^Other Score, the DeathThreat Score, and the