ABS183 - Utilizing the repertory grid elicitation technique with cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)

Over the past 30 years, Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) has been successfully and extensively utilized to study the meditation of language, artifacts, and technology across diverse contexts while maintaining the overall integrity of each complicated system and setting.  Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is a powerful theoretical framework but does not have associated methods, which creates challenges in conducting empirical studies. This paper focuses on the methodological contribution of using repertory grid elicitation in conjunction with CHAT, and the associated advantages and disadvantages. The repertory grid technique is based on George Kelly’s work in Personal Construct Theory. The use of the repertory grid elicitation technique provides a strong pathway to map participant observations obtained in interviews onto CHAT constructs. It also invites participants to think about their context in a different way, yielding new insights for both the participant and the researcher. By capturing the words of the participants, such as the identification of tools and associated definition and descriptions, the subject-centered viewpoint and vantage point is maintained and richly described, providing rich input to activity system analysis. It is aligned with the CHAT posture of the subject-centered viewpoint and in line with the functional method of double stimulation of Vygotsky and Engeström. The use of Leximancer 4 natural language processing text analytics is also noted. The use of the repertory grid elicitation technique is recommended to others conducting CHAT studies, to be refined and developed further by the CHAT research community for specific use with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory.