Tombstone inscription Its opposite
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
‘I died with my boots on’ – (I’d given up on life a while ago)
‘Aw, just when I was beginning to – (I was staggeringly competent from
get the hang of things’ the age of 12)
‘I burnt my candle at both ends, – (My annals are short, simple, mute,
to cast a brighter light’ and inglorious)
Other possible monadic statements listed by Epting et al. (1993) in describing
some of the work of Leitner (who invented this technique) are as follows:
(a) Please describe your conception of God.
(b) Please list your earliest memories.
(c) What have been your most significant (life-turning) events?
(d) Do you have dreams which deal in the same theme? What is it?
Epting’s article is worth looking at in detail if you’re seeking further ways of
identifying constructs, both grid and non-grid based.
4.3.3 Non-Verbal Techniques?
The grid itself, and the other techniques for eliciting constructs described
above, all depend on words. In that sense, they require a reasonably articulate
interviewee. But do you remember the definition of a construct given in
Section 2.1.1?: ‘Constructs are contrasts we devise when dealing with the
world, in order to understand it.’
And, while they’re commonly communicated in words – and we’ve got used
to thinking of constructs as spoken or written pairs of single words, or phrases
– it’s the actual distinctions a person recognises and makes that are the
constructs, and not the words in which these distinctions are expressed.
Constructs in themselves are non-verbal.
Try me out. Do constructs exist before the words in which they’re expressed?
Ask your interviewee to provide a set of objects (the real thing where practical;
otherwise, a photograph of them) to act as elements. Next, ask the interviewee
to group them (into two that are the same and one that is different, or place
them into subgroups, or simply to arrange them) in such a way as to signal
what s/he thinks of them – what s/he wishes to ‘say’ about the objects, nonverbally,
as clearly as possible.
For example, the objects may be photographs of paintings a person has seen.
(Or pictures on cards, or samples of textured material. You might care to look
up Neimeyer, 1981, if you want to try out the following example for real!) The
photographs might be lined up in order of preference, a smile and a grimace
providing information about which end of the construct applies to which end
of the line of photographs.
(smile) (grimace)