Subjective Methods

Introduction

The term subjective methods refers to a series of methods aimed to assess the psychological structure, content, and processes of individuals' subjective views, or personal meanings, about themselves and the world. These methods have been created and used by researchers more interested in the personal constructions of subjects than in classifying or locating them along theoretically pre-established dimensions or constructs (e.g. extraversion, locus of control). Typically, subjective methods are employed within orientations that place an emphasis on [Page 938]the subject's personal constructions such as constructivist (Neimeyer, 1993; see entry on ‘Theoretical Perspective: Constructivism’), hermeneutic, and narrative approaches. In this entry we will briefly describe the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT), the semantic differential, and provide a broad perspective on adjective lists, narrative methods and hermeneutics, although we recognize that, in their practice, psychologists have used a wider array of other less structured subjective methods.

Repertory Grid Technique (RGT)

In the context of his ‘Personal Construct Theory’ (see entry on ‘Personal Constructs’), George Kelly (1955) created the Role Construct Repertory Test, or reptest, and also its grid form. Since then, it has evolved not as a test but as a methodology known as RGT (for a review see Feixas & Cornejo, 1996; Fransella & Bannister, 1977; Rivas & Marco, 1985) with a variety of formats and applications which not only assess various issues in clinical psychology but also cover vocational assessment, education, business practice/management, and other more remote areas such as landscape appreciation and the study of urban tribes or anthropological investigation of folk beliefs of primitive tribes, with more than 2000 publications (Neimeyer, Baker & Neimeyer, 1990).

Defined broadly as ‘any form of sorting task which allows for the assessment of relationships between constructs and which yields this primary data in matrix form’ (Bannister & Mair, 1968: 136), the RGT assesses the dimensions and structure of personal meaning, usually in the subject's own terms. Thus, it aims at grasping the way an individual (although it has also been applied to the study of groups and institutions) makes sense of him or herself and others. The RGT explores the structure and content of the construct systems, implicit theories or meaning structures with which people construct their experience, perceive and act.

The administration of the RGT involves four stages (Feixas & Cornejo, 1996) in the context of a structured interview. First, a grid format must be adapted to the specific aims of the assessment as applied to a particular subject or group. Second, a set of usually 10–20 elements must be selected from the subject's world. Often, these elements represent various ‘role titles’ of significant others (heading columns in the example shown in Table 1) who play a part in the person's life (e.g. family members, employer, friends, a disliked figure) including his or her present self and the ideal self. However, a wide array of phenomena have been used as elements, including parts of one's body, self-roles, countries, occupations, and situations involving death and dying. Third, in order to elicit the constructs (which will be written in the rows, as in Table 1) the individual is asked to concentrate on pre-selected groupings of two or three elements and to construe them in terms of their similarities and/or contrasts, which requires the subject to provide the meaning dimensions that make these elements similar or different. In so doing, this interview elicits the personal templates by means of which the person interprets that particular domain of her or his experience. In the fourth stage, usually employing a rating system (Likert-type scale), the subject is required to allocate the remaining elements to the elicited constructs which takes a grid form with the elements as columns and the constructs as rows. Thus, by applying (rating) all the constructs across the entire set of elements a grid data matrix is created (see Table 1). This matrix can be analysed in a variety of ways ranging from qualitative appreciation of the nature and quality of the constructs used to the statistical analysis of the data using cluster analysis or factor analytic methods. Finally, a number of cognitive measures can be extracted (differentiation, cognitive complexity, self-esteem, conflict analysis, extremity of ratings, etc.) which can serve both to generate clinical hypotheses and to look for individual differences.

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