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

	3.3	Competition outdated – competition strong	8,	50	L
	4.2 New edition needed urgently to compete – no new editions planned by		16	83	I
		competitors
	5.1	Can sell more of this book than other publishers can of theirs – can’t		75	L
	6.5	No competition – lots of competition		92	H
	7.9	Cheaper than our nearest competitor – competitors’ pricing policy		66	L
		enables them to compete effectively
Promotion	1.7 Aimed at the trade – general advertising			66	L
	2.2	Worth an extensive advertising expenditure – modest budget only		33	L
	3.4	Will do well in long run without expensive advertising – will need		83	H
		constant support to do well
	4.1	Big advertising budget – small advertising budget	8,	83	I
	5.4	Modest advertising via direct mailing – extensive advertising using all	16	100	H
		promotional means
	5.6	Some conference promotions – trade promotions only		83	I
	6.7	Advertised heavily in trade press – not advertised in trade press		75	I
	7.4	Will sell at this price without promotion – not worth promoting		70	I
		extensively, will sell anyway
Popularity	1.4 Likely to sell – low volume			92	H
of topic	2.3 Demand likely to be high – little demand			67	I
	3.2	Current demand – demand well satisfied by others	6,	67	I
	3.5	Will walk off the shelf – slow sales likely	12	83	H
	5.3	Will sell well – won’t sell		100	H
	5.8	We’re doing well with this topic – our firm doesn’t do well with this		75	L
		topic
Contents	3.6 Good basic read – too much like a reference text to compete well			67	I
	4.3	Covers the ground well – essential bits missing		92	H
	5.2	A good standard coverage – too narrowly focused for our market	6,	75	L
	5.9	Standard topics there as expected – missing essential contents	12	100	H
	7.6	Reads well – difficult to read		66	L
	7.8 Coverage ensures its likely to become a standard – flavour of the month			92	H
Design	1.4 Illustrations well laid out – cramped appearance			75	M
	4.5	Nicely packaged – likely to fall apart	3,	70	L
	7.5	Well proportioned – wrong size for this sort of book	6	66	L
Totals			50,
			99

180 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

construct system about a given topic in a way that includes details of personal values, and about the implicational connections between constructs at several levels of detail. Hill’s content-analysis technique (Hill, 1995) depends on an understanding of constructs as values, a topic which I wish to examine in Chapter 8, and you might like to read that chapter first before turning to Hill.

THINGS TO DO

It’s difficult to practise a full content analysis by means of a worked exercise, since you need lots of data and several grids to do anything useful. The following exercises focus attention on different stages of the process.

Exercise 7.1 Identifying Categories

(a)Take a look at these 19 constructs, a very small subset of comments overheard at a wine tasting.

Consistent quality – quality inconsistent Smooth – petillant

Unreliable – always reliable

A long finish – little if any finish Fruity – grassy

Musty and stale – fresh and bright Expensive – cheap

Needs to rest and air – drinkable straight on opening Scented and flowery – deep and heavy

Cloudy – clear

Deep colour – colour rather shallow Yeasty – clear of yeast

Chocolate overtones – citrus overtones Heady – light

Sweet – dry

Ready for immediate drinking – will benefit from laying down

ANALYSING MORE THAN ONE GRID 181

Old and brown – young and fresh

Robust with tannin – gentle, without tannin roughness

Overpriced – a bargain.

(b)Devise a simple scheme of four or five categories, and then allocate the constructs to those categories.

(c)Find a friend who claims to know a lot about wine, and ask him or her to devise their own set of categories, allocating the constructs to them.

(d)Now place the two data sets into a single reliability table, along the lines described in Section 7.2.1, step 4.2. Discuss the similarities and differences. Then recast the table, laying it out so that, however they’re labelled, the categories which you’re both agreed on run from left to right and top to bottom of the table. (In other words, turn a table that looks like Table 7.2 into one arranged like Table 7.3.)

(e)Argue until you have agreed a set of common categories, and jot down the definitions.

(f)Finally, both of you repeat the analysis, independently, but using this single set of categories. Is the result an improvement over step (d)? (Work out the percentage similarity score for the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ table and see.)

I can’t provide you with any answers against which you might check your working, since I don’t know what categories you and your collaborator might devise! However, in case you can’t find a collaborator, and want to practise setting up the reliability table as in step (d), you may get a feel for this stage of a content analysis if you look at a sample category scheme which I have provided as Appendix 1.12.

Exercise 7.2 Practising Content Analysis: D-I-Y

Take a small data set of your own, 50 constructs or so, before you first commit yourself to a full-sized set of 400! Run through the various steps described in Section 7.2.1. Once you’ve completed them, you’ll recognise that the procedures are fairly straightforward, and certainly much less confusing than they might appear at first glance.

When you’ve finished, continue this chapter by returning to Section 7.2.3.

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Exercise 7.3 Preparing Grid Data for Honey’s Technique

Here’s a little refresher in the calculation of sums of differences, checking for reversals, and working out % similarity scores. As a reminder of what you need to do in Honey’s content-analysis technique, you’re asked to compute these against the supplied ‘overall’ construct, and to prepare your grid for content analysis.

As a senior manager in the oil business, you appreciate the value of experience in your project managers, but you know that experience isn’t just a matter of age; some of your younger engineers run their projects just as well as the older ones. You decide to capture the knowledge and expertise they have that makes the difference between success and failure in project management. Eight project managers of varying expertise (as defined by checking the records of all the projects they’ve managed in the last 10 years) are your elements, presented anonymously to 20 senior project managers who have managed major projects in the past themselves, while being responsible for other project managers at present.

Just one of the grids, from respondent no. 8, is shown below as Figure 7.2. It is already marked into strips ready for content analysis. Before you do this, you have to write onto each strip:

(a)The sums of differences between each construct and the ‘overall’ construct.

(b)The corresponding % similarity score (work it out from the formula in Section 6.1.2, step 7, or, much easier, just look it up in Appendix 4).

(c)Both of the above, reversed.

(d)For each construct, choose the lower of the two values (reversed/ unreversed) and circle it.

(e)Mark each construct with ‘H’, ‘I’, or ‘L’ depending on whether it is in the highest third, intermediate third, or lowest third of % similarity scores in this interviewee’s grid.

Appendix 1.13 shows you what your result should look like.

THINGS TO READ

A good way of complementing your knowledge of Honey’s technique is to read his original paper:

. Honey, P. ‘The repertory grid in action’. Industrial and Commercial Training 1979, 11, 452–459.

ANALYSING MORE THAN ONE GRID 183

Figure 7.2 Exercise with Honey’s technique

184 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

And while you’re ordering that item through inter-library loan, why not order the October and December issues of the journal as well? (That’s 1979, 11, 10 and 1979, 11, 12.) Each contains another article, presented in the same, user-friendly way, showing a different way of using grid technique.

CHAPTER 8

WORKING WITH PERSONAL

VALUES

8.1 Capturing Personal Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

8.2 Prioritising Personal Values: Resistance-to-

Change Technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

Things to Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

Things to Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

This chapter provides you with a way of assessing personal values. It draws on an important set of assumptions in personal construct theory, in relation to a rather large field of research relating to cognitive structure: to the mental frameworks or maps that people construct for themselves, and the ways in which these structures hang together.

8.1 CAPTURING PERSONAL VALUES

The last time you elicited a repertory grid, you may have noticed that some constructs seemed to be rather more important to your interviewee than others. Just a feeling you got from the energy with which s/he expressed them, or from the kinds of implications that seemed to follow from the way in which s/he used them.

You may have deliberately used the techniques of laddering down (introduced in Section 3.2.3 and developed in Section 4.4.1 as a way of expressing constructs in more specific, behaviourally defined detail) and of pyramiding (outlined in Section 4.4.2 as a way of identifying a variety of different, more detailed aspects of a given construct: while you’re at it, take another look at Figure 4.1). You might have wondered: if constructs can be

186 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

laddered down so that they’re more precise and detailed, can they be laddered up to arrive at more general variants? If constructs can ‘contain’ more specific ones, can they themselves be contained within superordinate ones; is there a hierarchy operating?

Indeed there is, and it’s given an important status in Kelly’s personal construct theory. Namely, personal constructs do not operate in isolation from each other, but form an integrated system. He expressed this formally as the ‘Organisation Corollary’: ‘Each person characteristically evolves for his experience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs.’ You can look at this in two ways, in terms of implied meaning, or in terms of structure.

A construct can be superordinate, because, when a person uses it to make a particular statement about a set of elements, s/he is also making a number of other, implied, statements which follow from it.

warm	^	cold
friendly ^ unfriendly	untrustworthy	^ trustworthy

Here, forexample, in a gridwhose topicis‘people Iknow’, you’ve pyramided the superordinate construct ‘warm ^cold’into two subordinate constructs, so you discover that for this individual, the meaning of ‘warm’implies friendliness and trustworthiness; or, conversely and equivalently, the meaning of ‘cold’ implies unfriendliness and untrustworthiness.

Now, if your interviewee changed their mind about a particular person’s standing on the ‘warm ^cold’ dimension, s/he might give a different rating on the ‘friendly ^ unfriendly’ and ‘trustworthy ^untrustworthy’ constructs as well. To the extent that change in one construct is implied by change in another, there is a structural connection between the constructs. So, if you asked your interviewee which construct would change if ratings on‘warm ^cold’changed, s/he might reply,‘Well, by and large, people who’re warm tend to be friendly, but the connection to their trustworthiness isn’t as strong; sometimes warm people can be untrustworthy, after all’. This is actually a complex issue, and I’m choosing my words with some simplification. It hinges on the extent to which there are different ‘flavours’of contrastingimplicit poles for any single emergent pole. If you want to pursue this further, read Riemann (1990) for an empirically based study, or Yorke (1978) for some implications for educational research. However, let’s keep it simple for the moment.

There is a well-developed form of grid called an‘Implications grid’, which can be used to identify the shape of the data structure, and hence the way in which meanings are organised in a person’s construct system. It was first described by Hinkle (1965), and you can learn about it most conveniently in Fransella et al. (2004). There are also two different ways in which constructs can be in a superordinate ^subordinate relationship to one another. Your best way of learning more about this is to read

WORKING WITH PERSONAL VALUES 187

Kelly’s original account of what he calls ‘abstracting across’ and ‘extending’ the ‘cleavage’of a superordinate construct; see Kelly (1963: 57^58).

Let’s keep it simple, then, for the moment. A set of constructs on any topic is part of a broader system of constructs, a system that forms a hierarchy. Some constructs are superordinate, and others subordinate, to each other, and the simple repertory grid which you learnt about in Chapter 3 simply taps into part of that hierarchy.

Constructs towards the top of the hierarchy:

.are more general in their relevance; they usually have a wide range of convenience;

.express personal preferences more strongly; they tend to be more valueladen;

.may relate to fundamental beliefs about oneself and one’s place in existence; these are known as core constructs;

.to the extent that they are personally central in this way, are likely to be resistant to change.

You’ve encountered this issue already, during the discussion of core versus peripheral constructs in Section 5.3.3.

8.1.1 Laddering Up to Arrive at Values

When you laddered down, you asked the question ‘How, in what way?’ You did it in two ways: simple laddering down, as in Section 4.4.1, and pyramiding, as in Section 4.4.2.

In contrast, when you ladder up, you ask the question ‘Why?’ The question is asked in two stages, one of which establishes the preferred pole of a construct, and the second of which establishes why your interviewee has made this choice: what its meaning is for him or her. The procedure runs as follows.

(1)Take the first construct in your interviewee’s grid. Write it down at the bottom of a fresh sheet of paper.

(2)Ask the interviewee which pole of the construct s/he prefers. This can be done in a variety of ways depending on the context and the meaning expressed by the construct:

. ‘Which end of this construct do you prefer?’

.‘If the construct applied to you, which end would you rather be described by?’

. ‘Which end of the construct feels nicer/good to you?’

188 THE EASY GUIDE TO REPERTORY GRIDS

(3) Ask the interviewee why s/he prefers that pole. Again, there is a variety of ways in which you can ask this question, and the word, ‘Why?’, used by itself, is best avoided. ‘Why?’ is a very abrupt word, if you think about it. You are not asking your interviewee to justify themselves, but to explain the importance the choice has for them. Far more preferable are the following:

. ‘Why, for you, is this important?’

. ‘That’s interesting! What’s happening here, I wonder?’

. ‘What follows as the result from this particular choice? For you, I mean.’

If there isn’t a clearly preferred pole, combine steps 2 and 3 into a single question that asks the interviewee about the status of the contrast being made: ‘Why is this an important distinction to be making about this topic?’

(4)Write the answer down immediately above the preferred pole of the previous construct, as a word or short phrase.

(5)Identify the contrasting pole. You’re identifying the interviewee’s reason in the form of a second construct, superordinate to the one you started with at step 1. Since this second construct is a construct, it has to have two poles! Read out the reason you were given, and ask what contrast is being offered. Any one of the following would do.

. ‘Now, what’s the contrast for [the words written down at step 4]?’

. ‘What would the other end of that construct be?’

. ‘And what would you be contrasting that with?’

(6)Write the answer down above the non-preferred pole of the previous construct. You now have two constructs, the original and the superordinate one above it.

(7)Repeat steps 2 to 6 for this new, superordinate construct. Which end of the construct is preferred and why? – the personal importance; and the opposite is? Write the result down, above the previous constructs.

(8)Repeat step 7 until your interviewee can’t go any further. You’ve arrived at a personal value.

(9)Take the next construct in your interviewee’s grid. You’ve laddered upwards and found the topmost construct for the first construct in the original grid; now see what other personal values your interviewee has: repeat steps 2 to 8, starting off with the second construct of the original grid and working upwards.