4.2.8 Supplied Elements
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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
You’ll recall, from Section 3.2.2, that there are several alternative ways of
arriving at a set of elements. One approach (a variant of those described in
Section 3.2.2) is to work with the elements provided by the interviewee, but for
you to supply an additional one or two, to test out a belief of your own about
the interviewee’s construct system. This allows you to compare the ways in
which the interviewee construes these key elements and the elements s/he has
provided.
The most common use of a key element of this kind is the self element.
Literally that: ‘myself’. By asking the interviewee to rate him- or herself on the
constructs, you find out what place his/her personal image or aspirations have
among the other elements being construed. It can be fascinating, as well as
useful to your purposes in eliciting a grid on ‘people I admire’ or ‘the other
students in my class’, to see how the interviewee construes ‘myself’ as one of
the elements in comparison to the others!
You give the interviewee an excellent opportunity to express his or her
aspirations and thoughts about the future when you provide two self elements,
the self and the ideal self. For example, ‘myself as I am now’ and ‘myself as I
would wish to be’.
These self elements needn’t pertain to the individual person’s actual self,
current or ideal. If you’re counselling someone who’s seeking a new job, a grid
in which the elements are possible companies to apply to could usefully
include ‘my own job here and now’ and ‘my ideal job’. A manager choosing
between different strategies as elements could have ‘my department now’ and
‘my department in a year’s time’ as elements.
The ‘ideal’ element is helpful in any situation in which the grid is being used
to help the interviewee make a choice. A set of possible outcomes would be
used to elicit constructs, and ratings of the elements on these constructs
obtained. These would then be compared with ratings of the supplied ‘ideal’
element on the same constructs, with a view to discovering which element
came closest to the ideal. Section 6.1.1 describes the procedure, and Jankowicz
(2001) provides a simple example of the use of the ideal element in a decision
procedure.
There is little contention over the use of supplied elements. Their use doesn’t
raise the same problems for analysis as those we discussed above in dealing
with supplied constructs.