Repertory Grid

Definition

George Kelley's technique (developed by 1963, "originally for the investigation of what people thought about other people," from his personal construct theory): each subject writes onto cards the names of familiar people (father, mother, sister, favourite teacher, most hated teacher…); the interviewer works through the cards in triads, asking the subject "to name any quality shared by two of the people which the third one did not share" — eliciting the subject's own constructs (friendly, helpful, intelligent…), which are then ranked for importance.

The environmental adaptation (Honikman and others): the same triadic elicitation applied to the built environment — "to establish the constructs against which people 'construe' the built environment or, in this case, photographs of rooms." One subject construed photographed living rooms against constructs such as "inoppressive/oppressive, spacious/crowded, informal/formal, fireplace/no fireplace, books/no books." Its advantage over the Semantic Differential: the constructs come from the subject, not the experimenter — answering the objection that pre-set scales suggest what people would never otherwise think, or demand ways of thinking they "find quite impossible."

The application limit Broadbent draws (1980): like the differential, the grid cannot dictate what to build (the "boring" problem) — its real use is measuring agreement/disagreement on fundamental issues between architect and client, student and teacher; Chris Abel has "attempt[ed] to relate students' architectural constructs to the designs they actually produce and the tutor's constructs to the ways in which they criticise those designs."

Related Methods

• Semantic Differential — the experimenter-set-scale technique the grid corrects.
• environmental-psychology — the field both techniques serve.

Source Support

• Architectural Objects and Their Design as a Subject for Semiotic Studies (Broadbent 1980) — Kelley's procedure described; Honikman's environmental adaptation with the living-room constructs; Abel's architect/student construct studies; the "boring" application limit shared with the Semantic Differential.
• Architecture and the Human Sciences (Broadbent 1973) — the human-science context. See empirical-methods.

Notes

• Requires fuller treatment: Kelley, The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955); the grid's later computational career (and its uptake in design research). (Logged.)