Circumgrids: A repertory grid package for personal computers

The purpose of this article is to introduce a computer grid package written for personal computers, Circumgrids, which is written in Turbo Pascal for the ffiM PC system, is user friendly, and provides several types of analysis.

Abstract

Personalconstruct theory (Kelly, 1955) is basedon the assumption that a person's behavior is shapedby his/her constructs.Because of the importance placed on constructs, the major task for construct psychologists is the assessment of theindividual's system of constructs.Nearly a thousand publications using construct theory have emerged since the theory's creation, with about 90% of these using scaling techniques called repertory grids.There are many forms of repertory grids (Beail, 1985;Fransella& Bannister, 1977), with each providing some numeric or geometric representation of the individual's construct system.In completing a grid, the person typically rates or ranks a set of peopleor events alonga number of construct dimensions, such as intelligent.friendly,and so forth.This rating/ranking produces matrices of numbers that are analyzed, per individual, by oneor more of numerous types of analysis.Results fromthese separate analyses are then either interpreted per individual, as in clinical assessment, or concatenated with results from other subjects' grids to be further analyzed.Research withgrids can be very time-consuming when analysis proceeds by hand.For a number of years, the Britishgovernment providedBritish researchers and clinicians free access to a principal components grid package.This service led to a dramatic increase in publications employing repertory grids.The service has sincebeendiscontinued.At present there are several commercially available computerpackages for grid analysis.The packages generally provideonly one type of analysis, are expensive, and requireboth programming skillsand access to mainframe computers.The average researcher, clinician, or studenthoping to use grid techniques today faces formidable obstacles.The purposeof this article is to introduce a computer gridpackage written for personal computers.The program, Circumgrids, is written in Turbo Pascal for the ffiM PC system, is user friendly, and provides several types of analysis.The name Circumgrids is derived fromthe wordcircumspection, a technical term