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

CONTENTS ix

7.2 Generic Approaches to Content Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 7.2.1 Bootstrapping Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 The Core-Categorisation Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 The Generic Content-Analysis Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Design Issues: Differential Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Reliability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

7.2.2 A Design Example. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 In Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 7.2.3 Standard Category Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Bootstrapped Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Theory-Based Schemes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Combining Bootstrapped and Theory-Based Approaches . . . 168

7.3 Honey’s Content Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 7.3.1 Rationale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 7.3.2 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 7.4 In Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Things to Do. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 Exercise 7.1 Identifying Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 Exercise 7.2 Practising Content Analysis: D-I-Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Exercise 7.3 Preparing Grid Data for Honey’s Technique. . . . . . . . 182 Things to Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

8. WORKING WITH PERSONAL VALUES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 8.1 Capturing Personal Values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 8.1.1 Laddering Up to Arrive at Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 8.1.2 The Process of Values Elicitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 How Do I Know That I’ve Got There? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 What Do I Do if I Can’t Seem to Get There?. . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 A Reminder. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

8.2 Prioritising Personal Values: Resistance-to-Change Technique. . . . 197 Things to Do. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Exercise 8.1 Explore Your Own Personal Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Exercise 8.2 Which of Your Values Are Resistant to Change? . . . . 206 Exercise 8.3 Working with Value Hierarchies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 Things to Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

9. ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF CONSTRUING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 9.1 Identifying Personal Changes in Construing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 9.1.1 Identifying Personal Change: The Simple Change Grid. . . . . 211 9.1.2 Identifying Personal Change: The Messy Change Grid . . . . . 214

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9.2. Identifying Differences Between People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 9.2.1 Facilitating Mutual Exploration: Simple Partnering . . . . . . . . 223 9.2.2 Entering Another Person’s World: The Exchange Grid . . . . . 225 9.3 In Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 Things to Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Exercise 9.1 A Simple Change Grid Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Exercise 9.2 Handling a More Complex Change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Exercise 9.3 An Exchange Grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Things to Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Appendix 1 Answers to Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Appendix 2 Extracts from the Transcript of a Grid Session . . . . . . . . . . 257 Appendix 3 Element % Similarity Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Appendix 4 Construct % Similarity Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272 Appendix 5 Extracts from the Transcript of a

Resistance-to-Change Session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Appendix 6 The Formal Content of Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory. . 277 Appendix 7 Aide-me´moire/Summary of Grid Procedures . . . . . . . . . . . 280 Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 Index of Names and First-named Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

LIST OF FIGURES

2.1 A repertory grid taken from an interview with an instructor . . . . . . . 17 3.1 A basic grid sheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 4.1 Laddering and pyramiding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 6.1 Cluster analysis – focusing the picture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 6.2 The store manager’s grid, before and after cluster analysis. . . . . . . . 122 6.3 Principal components analysis plot for the data in Table 6.13 . . . . . . 129 6.4 Store manager’s grid, variance accounted for,

and plot of first two components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 6.5 Two systems for showing star positions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 7.1 Using Honey’s technique. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 7.2 Exercise with Honey’s technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 8.1 ‘Crossing over’ during the laddering-up process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 8.2 A worksheet for laddering upwards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 A1.1 Answers to exercise with Honey’s technique. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

LIST OF TABLES

2.1 A brief list of applications in which a repertory grid can be used. . . . . 9 2.2 Examples of elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 3.1 Examples of elicited element categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3.2 Examples of qualifying statements for different topics . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 5.1 Characterising constructs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

6.1 An extract from a grid interview with a young training officer on ‘Trainers I have known’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

6.2Sums of differences vary depending on the number of constructs . . 100

6.3An extract from a grid interview with a young training officer on ‘Trainers I have known’, together with element % similarity

scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

6.4 Grid interview with the manager of the clothing section of

a department store . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

6.5Grid interview with the manager of the clothing section of a department store, examining the simple relationship between

two constructs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

6.6Grid interview with the manager of the clothing section of a department store, examining the simple relationship

between constructs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

6.7 Relationship between two constructs about six people . . . . . . . . . . . 108

6.8 Relationship between two constructs about six people, showing

a reversal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

6.9 Grid interview with the manager of the clothing section of a department store, examining the simple relationship between

constructs, and showing reversals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

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6.10Grid interview with the manager of the clothing section of

a department store, examining the simple relationship between

constructs, and showing reversals (% similarity scores) . . . . . . . . . . 117 6.11 Example of cluster analysis procedure for elements in Figure 6.2 . . 123 6.12 Example of cluster analysis procedure for constructs in Figure 6.2. . 125 6.13 Just some numbers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

6.14 Percentage of variance accounted for by each component of

Table 6.13. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

6.15 An extract from a grid interview with a young training officer on ‘Trainers I have known’, together with element difference scores. . . 139

6.16 An extract from a grid on ‘Computers I might buy’, together with element difference scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

6.17 An extract from a grid on ‘Computers I might buy’, together

with construct difference scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 7.1 Content-analysis procedure, Benefits Agency example . . . . . . . . . . . 153 7.2 Assessing reliability, step (4.2), before rearrangement . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 7.3 Assessing reliability, step (4.2), after rearrangement . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 7.4 Assessing reliability, step (4.3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 7.5 Assessing reliability, step (4.4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 7.6 Assessing reliability, step (4.5) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

7.7 Categories summarising factors assessed in venture capital decision-making. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

7.8 Examples of ‘overall’ constructs in Honey’s contents-analysis

technique. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

7.9 Content-analysis procedure: factors related to book sales as

seen by publisher’s sales staff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 8.1 Basic steps in laddering upwards: the first two iterations . . . . . . . . . 190 8.2 Completing the ladder shown in Table 8.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 8.3 A set of personal values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 8.4 Identifying the values hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 8.5 Number of times each personal value is chosen in Table 8.4 . . . . . . . 203 8.6 The values hierarchy based on Tables 8.4 and 8.5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

LIST OF TABLES xv

8.7 Choices made in Exercise 8.3, Question c. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 9.1 Change grid analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 9.2 One interviewee’s two grids, A1 and A2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

9.3 Single working grid sheet to summarise changes between

interviewee’s two grids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 9.4 Two different interviewees’ grids, Mr A and Ms B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 9.5 B’s attempt to reproduce A’s grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 A1.1 Example answers to Exercise 2.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 A1.2 Example answers to Exercise 4.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 A1.3 A simple element analysis of the grid shown as Table 6.15 . . . . . . 242 A1.4 A simple element analysis of the grid shown as Table 6.16 . . . . . . 242

A1.5 A simple element analysis of the grid shown as Table 6.16,

with % similarity scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

A1.6 An extract from a grid on ‘computers I might buy’, together

with construct difference scores, completed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244

A1.7 Grid interview with the manager of the clothing section of a department store, examining the simple relationship between constructs, and showing reversals (% similarity scores),

completed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 A1.8 The values hierarchy for Table 8.7, Question c . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 A6.1 The fundamental postulate and the corollaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Devi Jankowicz is Professor of Constructivist Managerial Psychology at the University of Luton. He has been using repertory grids in a variety of occupational and managerial applications for 30 years. He used to specialise in psychometric testing until it was suggested to him that talking to people in their own language might be more valuable than talking to them in psychologists’ language, and this book is written in that spirit. As well as being useful in his work as a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, this perspective has been particularly fruitful in his personal research on knowledge transfer across cultural boundaries between the West and the post-command economies of Central Europe.

PREFACE

This book is the result of some experiences I’ve had during the last 10 years, teaching repertory grid technique to a variety of audiences. There have been two main kinds of trainee. The first has comprised my direct students at Luton Graduate Business School, managers studying for MBA and MSc degrees on a part-time basis, and young graduates on the full-time masters programme. There have also been undergraduates, here and there, from the education and the management departments. All par for the course, one imagines, for a technique which presents itself as a mental-mapping and decision-making aid.

The second group, you might feel, is rather surprising. It comprises members and affiliates of the Occupational Division of the British Psychological Society, as part of their continuing professional development programme; psychologists and counsellors in some UK and Irish universities; and psychologists working for the Employment Service. Shouldn’t psychologists, the very people who ought to be well informed about cognitive structures, mental maps, and decision-making technique, already know all this?

You could be right, but by and large they don’t, and for two reasons: academic attitudes and simple availability.

ACADEMIC ATTITUDES

There’s a certain approach taken to repertory grids, and especially to the theoretical underpinning, personal construct psychology, in university psychology departments. The theory tends to be offered, at a rather basic level, as part of course on personality, and the technique, where it’s made available, in a two-hour seminar workshop in which the bare bones are practised but the applications, variants, and solutions to practical problems – ‘how do I present the grid results of a large sample of people rather than the single person on whom I practised?’ being the most common – are never addressed in any detail.

The attitude stems from a preference for positivist epistemology within the psychological profession, even where the more recent constructivist

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approaches are known about, and the related techniques understood. (If you’re curious about all this, you might like to glance at Jankowicz, 1987a; Neimeyer, 1983, or the fuller treatment in Neimeyer, 1985.)

The result has been that the repertory grid technique is little used beyond its specialist adherents, and the central value of personal construct psychology as the basis for understanding all epistemologies in the first place has been scandalously neglected – often in favour of a pointless argument between proponents of qualitative versus quantitative methods, statistical versus experiential approaches, all of which is largely irrelevant. And so, people like myself, part of an international network of personal construct psychologists numbering no more, I would guess, than a thousand worldwide, are approached to train those who should already be trained. One does what one can, and this book is part of it.

SIMPLE AVAILABILITY: TO MANAGERS IN PARTICULAR

To focus on the other, and broader, audience for this guidebook, the managers and practitioners. Forget all that about epistemologies. From your point of view in particular, there simply hasn’t been a simple practical guidebook to offer you for many years, ever since the Stewarts’ Business Applications of Repertory Grid, published in 1982, went out of print. There have been many books outlining the basic theory, and one or two on the technique itself, but none have gone into the kind of practical, procedural detail which a user, bereft of a decent introduction in the psychology departments or isolated as a practitioner, needs to see if s/he is to become comfortably proficient in repertory grid technique.

The second edition of the Manual of Repertory Grid Technique by Fransella, Bell & Bannister will appear in 2004 (also published by Wiley). That gives a more detailed and in-depth coverage of repertory grids, as did the first edition (1977) by Fransella & Bannister, which has been out of print for several years. This guidebook has been seen in its entirety by the senior author, who has shared details of the planned contents of the Manual with me, all within the constraints of our respective publication schedules.

Between the two, it may be possible to ameliorate, if not reverse, the neglect of this technique in the universities, and in the meanwhile provide the user with a solid foundation for practice.

It remains to thank my kind collaborators. Fay Fransella has already been mentioned; her spirit resides in the comments made by the ‘second voice’ of this book, though the responsibility for its embodiment in print is, of course, my own. Tom Ravenette provided examples of early forms of grid analysis