Research Methods in Education 6th Edition

1. PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS
© LOUIS COHEN, LAWRENCE
MANION & KEITH MORRISON

2. STRUCTURE OF THE CHAPTER
• Strengths of repertory grid technique
• Working with personal constructs
• Grid analysis
• Some examples of the use of repertory grid in
educational research
• Difficulties in the use of repertory grid
technique in research
• Resources

3. PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS
• People actively engage in making sense of and
extending their experience of the world.
• Personal constructs are the dimensions that we use
to conceptualize aspects of our day-to-day world.
• People differ from each other in their construction of
events.
• We use the constructs that we create to forecast
events and rehearse situations before their actual
occurrence.
• Constructs are sometimes organized into groups
which embody subordinate and superordinate
relationships.

4. KELLY’S FUNDAMENTAL POSTULATE
• A person’s processes are psychologically
channelized by the ways in which he or she
anticipates events.
• Constructs: the ways in which events are
construed.
• What is to be construed or understood are events
or elements.
• Constructs are essentially bipolar, that is, capable
of being defined in terms of polar adjectives (e.g.
happy-sad).
• A repertory grid is a representation of the
relationship between elements and constructs.

5. STRENGTHS OR REPERTORY GRID
TECHNIQUE
• An individualized technique where the respondent
provides the framework as well as the responses.
• The two-way nature of the data where elements
are related to constructs:
– Relationships between elements can be
assessed, since there is information about each
element provided by the set of constructs.
– Relationships between constructs can be
examined through the information provided for
each construct by the set of elements.

6. WORKING WITH PERSONAL
CONSTRUCTS
• Choosing elements:
– they should be a homogeneous set to ensure
that the constructs elicited from some of them
will also be relevant to other elements.

7. WORKING WITH PERSONAL
CONSTRUCTS
• Eliciting constructs:
– Triadic elicitation: choose three elements and
ask the participant to specify some important
way in which two of them are alike and thereby
different from the third. The way in which two
were alike forms one pole; the way in which the
third differs forms the other pole.
– Ask the participant for the opposite to the
similarity pole
• Elicited versus provided constructs
• Allocating elements to constructs

8. LADDERING
• An exploratory technique using implication to move from a
pole of a given construct to a pole of an as yet unelicited
construct.
• Ask the participant to indicate which pole of the given
construct is preferred.
• Having identified the preferred pole, the participant is then
asked ‘Why?’.
• The response to this forms one preferred pole of the higher
order or implied super-ordinate construct.
• The construct can then be completed by asking the
participant for the contrasting pole of the new construct.
• In turn the participant can then be asked for the preferred
pole of this new construct and again asked ‘Why?’ to
produce the first pole of the next higher order construct.

9. PYRAMIDING
• Ask respondents to think of a particular ‘element’, a person,
and then to specify an attribute which is characteristic of that
person.
• Then ask the respondent to identify what kind of person
would not have that characteristic.
• Then return to the first characteristic and ask ‘What more
can you tell me about a person who has that characteristic?’
and ‘What is the opposite of that characteristic?’
• Repeat the enquiry similarly for the opposite pole of the first
characteristic.
• Proceed to inquire similarly of the four construct poles thus
elicited.
• Two construct poles produce four construct poles and finally
eight construct poles.

10. GRID ANALYSIS
• Make all the constructs similarly aligned (all the
‘preferred’ poles at the same end).
• Look at relationships between elements and
between constructs:
– Correlation
– Cluster analysis
• Looking at the overall grid:
– Spatial representation

11. Spatial
representation
The longer the line, the more important the construct

12. DIFFICULTIES IN THE USE OF REPERTORY
GRID TECHNIQUE IN RESEARCH
• Tension between individuality and commonality. A
grid which is elicited wholly from the respondent is
the most valid representation of that person’s
construing. However research often demands
replications across subjects, so that for some
purposes there needs to be commonality across
respondents.
• Bi-polarity problem: When only one pole of the
construct is used, unwarranted inferences about
constructs’ polar opposites may be made.
• Uncertainty about the meaning attached to
midpoint ratings.

13. DIFFICULTIES IN THE USE OF REPERTORY
GRID TECHNIQUE IN RESEARCH
• Size of grid:
– Too small and it does not catch the complexity in
which the participant sees the world
– Too large and it becomes unwieldy and takes
time to collect
• Tension between theory and method

14. RESOURCES
• General Resources
• Organizations
• Freeware programs
• Software for purchase