Research Tips

Repertory Grid

Researchers often ask people to rate products or services according to pre-determined attributes, but sometimes it’s more helpful to use a technique that identifies which attributes participants themselves use to distinguish one brand, product, or service from another. Repertory Grid, developed by George Kelly, is ideally suited for this purpose.

Repertory Grid follows a procedure very similar to the “Which of these things is not like the others?” game that some people may remember from Sesame Street. Participants are presented with three objects (which may be actual products, brand names, etc.) and asked to say which two they think are most similar to one another and to explain what they believe makes them different from the third. This process is repeated until no new points of difference emerge. The resulting list of differences can then be used as a starting point for collecting quantitative data such as attribute ratings and similarity judgments.