The Repertory Grid is a method developed by George Kelly, based on his Personal Construct theory. The basis of this theory is to examine the 'personal constructs' through which individuals make sense of their worlds. Kelly saw these constructs as being bipolar in nature – examples might be friendly-hostile, loving-hating, friendly-cold. Although this approach can be used in many ways, it is particularly relevant to how people see other people (and can also be used within therapy). Generating a Repertory Grid involves asking individuals to consider a triad of three other people they know (it could also involve three objects, or three events etc.). Kelly called these 'elements'. They then have to think of ways in which two out of the three are alike, and the third is different. For example, they may say two of them are friendly, and the third hostile. This has then produced the bipolar construct friendly-hostile. This process is repeated with different triads, eliciting a range of bipolar constructs used by that individual. \nThe next step in this method is to create a grid containing the different elements, showing the ratings people gave to each element according to all the different constructs that emerged. In the example given above, if the individual creating the grid has 'elements' consisting of his friends Bob, Jane, Sally and David, with bipolar constructs such as friendly-cold, happy-sad, lively-reserved, then the resulting Repertory Grid would say how each of his four friends rated on each of the bipolar constructs. So Bob may emerge as friendly, happy, reserved. In practice, Repertory Grids tend to contain many more elements/constructs than this example. The next step in this method is to analyse the patterns that emerge between all these different constructs. For example, an individual may believe that people who are rich are also always shallow, or that people who are intelligent are always cold. Such rigid constructs can lead to relationship difficulties, and some psychotherapists use the Repertory Grid to help find out such things about a client's construct system. The therapist and client together may then explore possible new ways of making sense of the world, either by generating new constructs, or by being less rigid in the way the client applies their existing constructs. For example, by realising that not every intelligent person is necessarily cold. \nThe idea that individuals have the capacity to change the way they make sense of the world is called by Kelly constructive alternativism, and is a central part of his theory. This emphasis on people's capacity for autonomy is one reason why Kelly is classified as a humanistic psychologist (see humanistic perspective). Central to this method is its focus on allowing people to reveal their own constructs, rather than ones presented by the researcher. For example, one person might have a bipolar construct of friendly-hostile, and someone else may have one of friendly-cold. This approach could be compared with other approaches (such as experimental), which primarily focus on making sense of people in terms of concepts generated by the researcher. Although course the very concept of seeing things in terms of 'bipolar constructs' is Kelly's own way of making sense of people's construct systems, Kelly would argue that at least individuals are encouraged to generate their own particular bipolar constructs, rather than ones imposed by the researcher. 