The Elements
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67
68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84
85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101
102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118
119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131
How did the interviewee respond to the elements you proposed? If they were
proposed by the interviewee, did you use them all? Which ones didn’t you
use, and why not? – does this tell you anything about the way the interviewee
views the topic?
If you used eliciting statements to choose elements, which elements were
offered under which characteristic? In a grid which evaluated a training
programme, for example, suppose you agreed on the element set proposed by
the interviewee in response to a request to think of two training sessions that
were ‘very good’, two that were ‘poor’, and two in between. You could glean
some useful information simply by seeing which actual training sessions were
proposed in each category, and how readily the interviewee proposed them,
even before you see how they were construed in the grid itself.
If you’re conducting a classroom exercise in which you want to discover and
discuss how pupils construe the eight most important social developments of
the twentieth century, and you ask each pupil to nominate their eight as
elements, then a simple examination and classroom discussion of all their
elements is surely de rigueur if you wish to understand their perspective on
recent social history before you start eliciting their constructs!