Repertory grid

The repertory grid is an interviewing technique which uses nonparametric factor

analysis to determine an idiographic measure of personality. It was devised
by George Kelly in 1955 and is based on his personal construct
theory of personality.
The repertory grid is a methodological tool originally developed within the field
of psychology by George Kelly as part of his Personal Construct Theory. Over
time, it has found its way into sociological research due to its ability to capture
how individuals interpret their social worlds. In sociology, the repertory grid is
valuable for understanding how people construct meanings, categorize
experiences, and interact with the social structures that influence their behavior.
The repertory grid is a technique for identifying the ways that a person construes
(interprets or gives meaning to) his or her experience. It provides information
from which inferences about personality can be made, but it is not a personality
test in the conventional sense. It is underpinned by the personal construct
theory developed by George Kelly, first published in 1955.
A grid consists of four parts:
1. A topic: it is about some part of the person's experience.
2. A set of elements, which are examples or instances of the topic. Working
as a clinical psychologist, Kelly was interested in how his clients construed
people in the roles they adopted towards the client, and so, originally, such
terms as "my father", "my mother", "an admired friend" and so forth were
used. Since then, the grid has been used in much wider settings
(educational, occupational, organisational) and so any well-defined set of
words, phrases, or even brief behavioural vignettes can be used as elements.
For example, to see how a person construes the purchase of a car, a list of
vehicles within that person's price range could be a set of elements.
 3. A set of constructs. These are the basic terms that the client uses to make
sense of the elements and are always expressed as a contrast. Thus the
meaning of "good" depends on whether you intend to say,
"good versus poor", as if you were construing a theatrical performance, or
"good versus evil", as if you were construing the moral
or ontological[philosophical] status of some more fundamental experience.
4. A set of ratings of elements on constructs. Each element is positioned
between the two extremes of the construct using a 5- or 7-point rating scale
system; this is done repeatedly for all the constructs that apply; and thus its
meaning to the client is modelled, and statistical analysis varying from
simple counting to more complex multivariate analysis of meaning, is made
possible.
Constructs are regarded as personal to the client, who is psychologically similar
to other people depending on the extent to which they would tend to use similar
constructs, and similar ratings, in relating to a particular set of elements.
The client is asked to consider the elements three at a time, and to identify a way
in which two of the elements might be seen as alike, but distinct from, contrasted
to, the third. For example, in considering a set of people as part of a topic dealing
with personal relationships, a client might say that the element "my father" and
the element "my boss" are similar because they are both fairly tense individuals,
whereas the element "my wife" is different because she is "relaxed". And so we
identify one construct that the individual uses when thinking about people:
whether they are "tense as distinct from relaxed". In practice, good grid interview
technique would delve a little deeper and identify some more behaviourally
explicit description of "tense versus relaxed". All the elements are rated on the
construct, further triads of elements are compared and further constructs elicited,
and the interview would continue until no further constructs are obtained.
Using the repertory grid
Careful interviewing to identify what the individual means by the words initially
proposed, using a 5-point rating system could be used to characterize the way in
which a group of fellow-employees are viewed on the construct "keen and
committed versus energies elsewhere", a 1 indicating that the left pole of the
construct applies ("keen and committed") and a 5 indicating that the right pole of
the construct applies ("energies elsewhere"). On being asked to rate all of the
elements, our interviewee might reply that Tom merits a 2 (fairly keen and
committed), Mary a 1 (very keen and committed), and Peter a 5 (his energies are
very much outside the place of employment). The remaining elements (another
five people, for example) are then rated on this construct.
Typically (and depending on the topic) people have a limited number of genuinely
different constructs for any one topic: 6 to 16 are common when they talk about
their job or their occupation, for example. The richness of people's meaning
structures comes from the many different ways in which a limited number of
constructs can be applied to individual elements. A person may indicate that Tom
is fairly keen, very experienced, lacks social skills, is a good technical supervisor,
can be trusted to follow complex instructions accurately, has no sense of humour,
will always return a favour but only sometimes help his co-workers, while Mary
is very keen, fairly experienced, has good social and technical supervisory skills,
needs complex instructions explained to her, appreciates a joke, always returns
favours, and is very helpful to her co-workers: these are two very different and
complex pictures, using just 8 constructs about a person's co-workers.
Important information can be obtained by including self-elements such as "Myself
as I am now"; "Myself as I would like to be" among other elements, where the
topic permits.
Analysis of results
A single grid can be analysed for both content (eyeball inspection) and structure
(cluster analysis, principal component analysis, and a variety of
structural indices relating to the complexity and range of the ratings being the
chief techniques used). Sets of grids are dealt with using one or other of a variety
of content analysis techniques. A range of associated techniques can be used to
provide precise, operationally defined expressions of an interviewee's constructs,
or a detailed expression of the interviewee's personal values, and all of these
techniques are used in a collaborative way. The repertory grid is emphatically not
a standardized "psychological test"; it is an exercise in the mutual negotiation of
a person's meanings.
The repertory grid has found favour among both academics and practitioners in a
great variety of fields because it provides a way of describing people's construct
systems (loosely, understanding people's perceptions) without prejudging the
terms of reference—a kind of personalized grounded theory.
Unlike a conventional rating-scale questionnaire, it is not the investigator but the
interviewee who provides the constructs on which a topic is rated. Market
researchers, trainers, teachers, guidance counsellors, new product developers,
sports scientists, and knowledge capture specialists are among the users who find
the technique (originally developed for use in clinical psychology) helpful.

A common way to describe the RepGrid technique is identifying a set of

"elements" (a set of "observations" from a universe of discourse) which are rated
according to certain criteria termed "constructs". “The elements and/or the
constructs may be elicited from the subject or provided by the experimenter
depending on the purpose of the investigation. Regardless of the method, the basic
output is a grid in the form of n rows and m columns, which record a subject's
ratings, usually on a 5- or 7-point scale, of m elements in terms of n constructs”.
One reason why repertory grid technique is popular is that they “have three major
advantages over other quantitative and qualitative techniques. These advantages
are the ability to determine the relationship between constructs, ease of use, and
the absence of researcher bias. Repertory grids allow for the precise defining of
concepts and the relationship between these concepts.”.
The RepGrid technique is best used when participants have practical experience
with the studied domain. E.g. they must be able to identify representative elements
and be able to compare them through a set of (their own) criteria. E.g. doing grid
analysis with teachers about educational modelling languages might not be a good
idea, but it could be done with researchers and power users that are familiar with
recent advances in learning design. This also implies that RepGrid works best
when concrete and practical examples exist. E.g. this would be the case for various
tools that support on-line learning LMS, portalware, etc.)

Some other definitions of RGT (emphasized text by DKS).

“The RGT (Kelly, 1955) originally stems from the psychological study of
personality (see Banister et al., 1994; Fransella & Bannister, 1977, for an
overview). Kelly assumed that the meaning we attach to events or objects defines
our subjective reality, and thereby the way we interact with our environment. The
idiosyncratic views of individuals, that is, the different ways of seeing, and the
differences to other individuals define unique personalities. It is stated that our
view of the objects (persons, events) we interact with is made up of a
collection of similarity–difference dimensions, referred to as personal
constructs. For example, if we perceive two cars as being different, we may come
up with the personal construct fancy–conservative to differentiate them. On one
hand, this personal construct tells something about the person who uses it, namely
his or her perceptions and concerns. On the other hand, it also reveals information
about the cars, that is, their attributes.” (Hassenzahl & Wessler, 2000:444)
“[..]The “Repertory Grid” [...] is an amazingly ingenious and simple ideographic
device to explore how people experience their world. It is a table in which, apart
from the outer two columns, the other columns are headed by the names of objects
or people (traditionally up to 21 of them). These names are also written on cards,
which the tester shows to the subject in groups of three, always asking the same
question: “How are two of these similar and the third one different?” [...] The
answer constitutes a “construct”, one of the dimensions along which the subject
divides up her or his world. There are conventions for keeping track of the
constructs. When the grid is complete, there are several ways of rating or ranking
all of the elements against all the constructs, so as to permit sophisticated analysis
of core constructs and underlying factors (see Bannister and Mair, 1968) and of
course there are programs which will do this for you.” (Personal Construct
Psychology, retrieved 14:09, 26 January 2009 (UTC).)
“The Repertory Grid is an instrument designed to capture the dimensions and
structure of personal meaning. Its aim is to describe the ways in which people
give meaning to their experience in their own terms. It is not so much a test in the
conventional sense of the word as a structured interview designed to make those
constructs with which persons organise their world more explicit. The way in
which we get to know and interpret our milieu, our understanding of ourselves
and others, is guided by an implicit theory which is the result of conclusions drawn
from our experiences. The repertory grid, in its many forms, is a method used to
explore the structure and content of these implicit theories/personal meanings
through which we perceive and act in our day-to-day existence.” (A manual for
the repertory grid, retrieved 12:18, 26 January 2009 (UTC)).
“The term repertory derives, of course, from repertoire - the repertoire of
constructs which the person had developed. Because constructs represent some
form of judgment or evaluation, by definition they are scalar: that is, the
concept good can only exist in contrast to the concept bad, the concept gentle can
only exist as a contrast to the concept harsh. Any evaluation we make - when we
describe a car as sporty, or a politician as right-wing, or a sore toe as painful -
could reasonably be answered with the question 'Compared with what?' The
process of taking three elements and asking for two of them to be paired in
contrast with the third is the most efficient way in which the two poles of the
construct can be elicited.”. (Enquire Within, Kelly's Theory Summarised),
retrieved 12:18, 26 January 2009 (UTC).
“The repertory grid technique is used in many fields for eliciting and analysing
knowledge and for self-help and counselling purposes.” (Repertory Grid
Technique, retrieved 12:18, 26 January 2009 (UTC).)
“The repertory grid technique is a phenomenological approach which sits more
with grounded theory [Glaser & Strauss], and interpretive research rather than
with positivist, hypothesis-proving, approaches. The focus is on understanding,
before developing theories that can be subsequently proved (or disproved). This
is in contrast to most software engineering research where positivist approaches
tend to dominate [...] We consider that one of the factors contributing to this
narrow focus is the lack of a well-established body of research methods and
techniques that are appropriate to examining the behavioural science aspect of
software engineering.” (Edwards et al, 2009).
Typical repertory grid technique
Most repertory grid analyses use the following procedure:
Step 1 - element elicitation
The designer has to select a series of elements that are representative of a topic.
E.g. to analyze perception of teaching styles, the elements would be teachers. To
analyze learning materials, the elements could be learning objects. To analyze
perception of laptop functionalities, the elements are various laptop models. For
the various kinds of knowledge elicitation interviews (as described below), often
cards are used. E.g. the element names (and maybe some extra information such
as a picture) are shown to the participants.
Step 2- construct elicitation
The next step is knowledge elicitation of personal constructs about these
elements. To understand how an individual perceives (understands/compares)
these elements, scalar constructs about these elements then have to be elicited.
E.g. using the so-called triadic method, interviewed people will have to compare
learning object A with B and C and then state in what regards they are being
different. E.g. Pick the two teachers that are most similar and tell me why. then
tell me how the third one is different. The output will be contrasted attributes
(e.g. motivating vs. boring or organized vs. a mess). This procedure should be
repeated until no more new constructs (words) come up.
Step 3 - rating
These constructs are then reused to rate all the elements in a matrix (rating grid),
usually on a simple five or seven point scale. A construct always has two poles,
i.e. attribute pairs with two opposites. These poles represent contrasts and not
necessary "real oppositions", but both are expressed with same kind of "Likert"
scale.
Step 4 - Analysis
Individual grids are then analysed with multivariate statistical procedures such as
two-way cluster analysis or principal component component analysis
(see Analysis_techniques).
Alternative (combined)
Sometimes, element elicitation, construct elicitation and rating are done in a
combined fashion. E.g. The participant first enters some elements (e.g. six), then
will be asked to prodruce constructs for a triad and directly rate all other elements.
Also, the participant is asked to continue adding elements and constructs until
every element is discriminated from each other and every construct is different (in
explanation) from each other. E.g. the default elicitation algorithm in RepGrid IV,
personal edition is based on such a method, published by Shaw (1980).
In addition, there exist methods to aggregate individual grids, or to construct
"common grids", e.g. for a group of experts, or to create standardized
element/construct complete grids to study a large population. In the latter case,
we can't call these "personal constructs" anymore.
Types of repertory grids
Today we can distinguish four kinds of using repertory grids, and that depart from
Kelly's original idiographic (personal) constructs:
(1) Real repertory grids: Participants identify both elements and constructs. This
will lead to researcher-unbiased view of a topic. The researcher will get a rich
dataset and which will make comparisons between participants difficult, i.e. some
appropriate qualitative data analysis technique will have to be used.
(2) Grids with fixed elements. Participants are expected to build constructs about
a supplied set of elements that judged to be representative of a topic by the
researcher. E.g. some literature review about educational modeling
languages could yield to a series of types among which the researcher then
chooses the most representative examples and are likely to be known by most
participants.
(3) Grids with fixed constructs. Participants are asked to use a set of supplied
constructs with a set of elements they are familiar with. This can be done in two
steps. E.g. in order to study how they look at various kinds of on-line
environments for learning teaching. The researcher prompts the participant to
name an example of each kind like "Dokeos" for an LMS, Mediawiki for Wiki,
Drupal for Portalware, etc. An other method is provide a pools (i.e. a list) of
systems from which the participants can choose. Or finally, one could draw up the
list jointly (Tan & Hunter, 2002: 45).
(4) Grids with both fixed elements and fixed constructs. Participants are
expected to rate elements representative of a domain with constructs
representative of a population. This is often used in marketing research (or
similar) but also can be used in a stage that follows idiographic analysis in order
to do confirmatory research, or exploratory nomothetic research with many
individuals, or to within some kind of "group" elicitation process. In some
literature, we even found the misperception that repertory grids are fixed, e.g. in
Giovannella (2001), an otherwise interesting paper.