Repertory Grid Techniques

The Repertory Grid Elicitation and Reflection Projects: Talkback Through Personal Experience

We devised a variety of reflective computer programs based on our developments of the repertory grid. These have been successfully used in too many projects to be listed here. (Laurie Thomas and Sheila Harri-Augstein 1985 & 1993) The FOCUSed grid can be displayed in many forms to reveal the patterns of meaning inherent in the ordering of elements on constructs.

Interactive TRIGRID offers these same facilities in a less mathematical form, allowing the learner to converse and experiment with the re-ordering of their elements and constructs, giving priority to their construing rather than any city block cluster analysis. The REFLECT program talks the user systematically step by step back through these patterns of meaning.

CHANGEGRID uses a series of grids elicited from the same person over a period of time to exhibit the process of change in attitude and understanding towards a topic. This is a powerful means of enabling reflective self-appraisal of personal change.

PERCEIVE allows the user to explore the structure of their own perceptual processes and EVALUATE reveals the value judgments inherent in all construing.

These programs all conducted powerful reflective conversations with the user. The PAIRS program uses similar .methods with two users, allowing them to explore how their personal construing of a shared topic, map onto one another. The EXCHANGE and CONVERSE programs take this interpersonal conversation further; allowing each to express their own experience in their own terms. They can then progressively map one onto the other, revealing areas of agreement and disagreement and areas of understanding and misunderstanding. POOL, REFINE and CONSENSUS FRAME pool the verbal labels variously to negotiate an agreed language. SOCIO – GRIDS uses these methods to elicit and display the contents of a group’s elements that are of shared interest e.g ‘manufacturing faults’, ‘the contents of the London Science Museum’ or the ‘statistical terms’ used in teaching psychology students about the normal curve or the SPSS programs. We used it in a very large international company to help them stabilize their taste panels. And I have used it with my undergraduate students to enable them to map their understandings of statistics onto mine and vice versa.

Self-Organised Learning – The Way to Personal and Organisational Growth
Thomas and Harri-Augstein, 1985, Re-published in 1993 and again for Routledge PSYCHOLOGY REVIVALS in 2014

Each of the following computer techniques are fully described in the Self-Organised Learning book which has been re-published as Routledge’s Psychology Revival, titled: Self-Organised Learning: Foundations of a Conversational Science for Psychology