2.1.3 A Description of the Other Person in Their Own Terms
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You’ll find that, as a bare-bones procedure, a grid is very straightforward.
There’s nothing difficult about it. However, there is a substantial amount of
skill involved in obtaining an accurate description of the other person’s
constructs and values, and this book sets out to teach you how to do so. The
‘Things to Do’ section includes exercises which will help you to practise what
I’m preaching.
The end result is a description which stays true to the constructs being offered
by the other person, rather than to your own. This involves you in questioning,
checking, and mulling over what exactly the other person means – in other
words, negotiating your understanding of what the other person means. It’s
very much a two-way process.
As well as being procedurally simple, the technique is relatively quick. With
practice, you’ll find that you can obtain all the individual, distinct constructs a
person has on a given topic in under an hour. (With practice also, another 40
minutes or so will be sufficient time to arrive at the person’s core constructs
and personal values, by use of the laddering and resistance to change
techniques I describe in Sections 8.1.1 and 8.2.)
Some potential users get worried at this point. ‘An hour spent with one person
is too long’, they’ll tell you. Well, that’s just too bad! If you want to do
something properly, you take the time involved. An hour’s structured
interviewing isn’t a lot to ask for results which are very powerful indeed.
Quite so.The alternativeswhich people haveinmindwhen theymake this comparison
are often (Jankowicz, 2000a: 96):
(a) a conversation lasting 5 to10 minutes, a procedure which can be informative but
never to the level of detail obtained by a grid
(b) a semi-structured or fully structured interview which lasts between 30 and 60
minutes: almost as long, but unlikely to have the same precision unless it is, in
fact, a repertory grid interview!
(c) a psychometric test, which doesn’t describe the person in terms of his or her own
constructs. It imposes researchers’own constructs, their own framework for understanding
people, onto the individual, with all the force and energy of a supermarket
bread-slicingmachine.Andmanypsychometric testsareanhour long, inanycase.