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Repertory Grid Methods
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Developed within personal construct theory, repertory grid
methods represent a widely used set of techniques for studying personal
and interpersonal systems of meaning.
Because of their flexibility, repertory grids (or repgrids) have been
used in approximately 3,000 studies of a broad variety of topics,
ranging from children’s understandings of physical science principles
and consumer preferences, to formal structures of self-reflection
within cognitive science and the mutual validation of belief systems
between friends. However, their most consistent area of
application has probably been in the clinical domain, where grids have
been
used to assess the properties of meaning systems of different groups of
persons (e.g., those diagnosed as “thought disordered” or “agoraphobic”), and how these change over the
course
of treatment.
The “role construct repertory test” (or reptest) was initially
designed by George Kelly, the author of
personal construct psychology (PCP), as a means of assessing the
content of an
individual’s repertory of role constructs
—the
unique system of interconnected meanings that define his or her
perceived relationships to others. In its simplest form, the
reptest requires the respondent to compare and contrast successive sets
of three significant people (e.g., my mother, my father, and myself),
and formulate some
important way in which two of the figures are alike, and different from
the third . For example, if prompted with the above triad, a
person might respond, “Well, my mother and I are very trusting of
people,
whereas my dad is always suspicious of their motives.” This basic
dimension, trusting of people vs. suspicious of their motives,
would then be considered one of the significant themes or constructs
that the person uses to organize, interpret, and approach the social
world,
and to define his or her role in it. By presenting the respondent
with a large number of triads of varying elements
(e.g., a previous romantic partner, best friend, a disliked person,
one’s
ideal self; for details see element
selection), the reptest elicits a broad sampling of the personal
constructs that constitute the person’s outlook on life and perceived
alternatives.
These constructs can then be interpreted impressionistically, used as
the basis for further interviewing of the respondent, or categorized
using any of a number of reliable systems of content
analysis,
conducted either manually or using available computer programs.
While the results of the reptest are often revealing, most contemporary
users prefer to extend the method beyond the simple elicitation of
constructs, by prompting the respondent subsequently to rate or rank
each of the elements (e.g., people) on the resulting construct
dimensions. For example, using
the triadic comparison method described above, a respondent might
generate a set of 15 constructs (e.g., trusting vs. suspicious; moved
by feelings vs. rational; has ambition vs. no goals; young vs. old),
which might be
arrayed in 15 rows on a sheet of paper. She might then be asked to
assign
a number to each of 10 elements (e.g., my mother, father, self,
partner)
arranged in columns going across the sheet, representing where each
figure
would fall on, say, a 7-point scale anchored by the poles of each
construct.
For instance, “mother” might be seen as 1 on trusting vs. suspicious,
representing very trusting, whereas “father” might be placed at 5 on
this same scale, representing moderately suspicious. The intersection
of the 15 construct rows with the 10 element columns forms the “grid,”
and the matrix of 150 specific ratings it contains is amenable to a
wide range of analyses. In
practice, repertory grids can be virtually any size, from 6 constructs
and elements to literally hundreds of each for a given respondent.
However,
most research indicates that the amount of new information about the
person’s
meaning system in a domain (e.g., perceptions of acquaintances) begins
to peak once approximately 15 to 20 constructs and a similar number of
elements have been sampled. Although the repgrid was originally devised
as an interview-based or paper-and-pencil measure, most contemporary
users
rely on any of a number of
computer programs for their elicitation and analysis, such as
the popular WebGrid V program available
via
the Internet.
Although the specific element ratings on important constructs are
often informative in themselves (e.g., seeing that a respondent views
her father as 'suspicious' and 'having no goals', but also as
'rational'),
it is typically more helpful to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the
grid to discern larger patterns. This might involve correlating and factor analyzing the matrix of ratings to see
at
a glance which constructs “go together” for the respondent (e.g.,
everyone
who is trusting may also be seen as moved by feelings), or to learn
what
people are most and least alike in the respondent’s view. These
linkages
among constructs often suggest why people remain “stuck” in symptomatic
patterns, as when a client resists reconstruing himself as happy
instead
of depressed, because the former is associated with being superficial
as
opposed to deep. Similarly, patterns of identification among elements
in
a grid can be clinically informative, with some of these (e.g., degree
of correlation between actual self and ideal self) providing useful
indices of progress in psychotherapy.
An interesting feature of grid technique is that it combines aspects of
both idiographic assessment, which strives to
reveal unique dimensions of a given respondent’s outlook, and nomothetic research, which seeks general
patterns across people. Thus, the format of the repgrid
essentially guides
the respondent in constructing his or her own questionnaire (by
eliciting
the individual’s own constructs and relevant elements or figures to
rate),
while permitting comparisons across different people or groups.
For
example, depressed individuals, relative to others, tend to show not
only
distinctive themes in the content of their constructs (e.g., more
self-references
and more morally evaluative themes), but also distinctive overall
structure
(e.g., “tighter" intercorrelations among constructs, and
more
“polarized” or extreme perceptions). This blend of projective and
objective
testing has made grid technique useful to both clinicians and
scientists
seeking to understand how different persons and groups organize their
view of themselves and the world.
Describing a few of the problems to which repgrids have been applied
gives some idea about the range and flexibility of the method. Grids
have been used to study the long-term adjustment of survivors of
incest, who carry with them a sense of distance from other people
decades after the sexual abuse. They have also been used to measure
processes
of identification with other clients and therapists within group therapy settings, and to predict who
is most likely to benefit from this form of treatment. Grids have been
applied to the study of the development and breakdown of romantic
relationships and friendships, by looking at the degree of convergence
between partners in the way they construe experiences at increasingly
intimate levels.
Other investigators have relied on grids to understand the distinctive
differences in the knowledge structures
of
experts and novices in a given domain, and to refine the
discriminations made by assembly line workers in detecting product
flaws. As the
use of these methods continues to grow with the dissemination of ever
more
powerful computerized systems for their elicitation and analysis, it
seems
likely that repertory grids will become an increasingly popular tool
for
both helping professionals and social scientists.
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