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WebGrid (Gaines & Shaw, 2007) is a web-based conceptual modeling service based on Kelly’s (1955) conceptual grids derived from personal construct psychology (Gaines & Shaw, 2010).

The tools readily integrate with survey methodologies and have the merit of proving instant online conceptual models in graphic form enabling participants to view their own models and compare them with those of others in the community, together with overall socionets of cognitive relations between members, and consolidated conceptual models that show the sociocognitive structure of the community.

The next section outlines the socio-psychological foundations of the method and its links with theories of social action, and the following section provides a case history illustrating their application.

The next section outlines the socio-psychological foundations of the method and its links with theories of social action, and the following section provides a case history illustrating their application.

relations between members, and consolidated conceptual models that show the sociocognitive structure of the community. The next section outlines the socio-psychological foundations of the method and its links with theories of social action, and the following section provides a case history illustrating their application.

PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY

Kelly’s (1955) personal construct psychology provides a framework for conceptual modeling based on Dewey’s pragmatic instrumentalism that models the futureorientation characterizing living systems. Dewey (1910) saw our conceptual systems as forming in order to be able to anticipate a world that had sufficient coherence in time for such anticipation to be reasonably effective and provide evolutionary advantage.

Kelly based his constructivist psychology on Dewey's insights, taking anticipation as the generative principle underlying all psychological phenomena, that "a person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events" (Kelly, 1955, p.46), and deriving all other aspects of psychological processes as corollaries of this fundamental postulate. His first corollary is that of construction, that "a person anticipates events by construing their replications", where: "By construing we mean 'placing an interpretation': a person places an interpretation upon what is construed. He erects a structure, within the framework of which the substance takes shape or assumes meaning. The substance which he construes does not produce the structure; the person does" (Kelly, 1955, p.50).

Kelly uses a templet metaphor for our constructive processes: "Man looks at his world through transparent patterns or templets which he creates and then attempts to fit over the realities of which the world is composed. The fit is not always very good. Yet without such patterns the world appears to be such an undifferentiated homogeneity that man is unable to make any sense out of it. Even a poor fit is more helpful to him than nothing at all." (Kelly, 1955, p.8-9).

One can use the more common term, concept, in place of templet providing one notes that: fitting a templet or concept to experience may be not only a classification but also the setting of appropriate parameters in a model or theory, and the derivation of its consequences; and that fitting a templet or concept can be an action changing the world to induce the fit, not just a passive process of perception of whether an templet or concept fits an experience. Dewey and Kelly accommodate within the term anticipation: prediction of what may happen; action to make something happen; imagination of what might happen or be made to happen; and preparation for eventualities that may well never happen.

Kelly’s (1955, p.56-64) “organization” and “dichotomy” corollaries focus on the relations between templets/concepts, that fitting one implies that some others are entailed by it and also fit, and some others are negatively entailed, or opposite to it, and do not. He saw a triple of concepts with two in opposition but entailing a common superordinate as a fundamental psychological structure that he termed a construct. He saw the relations of entailment and opposition as fundamental constraints upon the meanings being imposed on experience, noting that "no construct ever stands entirely alone; it makes sense only as it appears in a network" (Kelly, 1955, p.304).

The network of constructs used by an individual in a certain role is constitutive of that role and of the individual’s actions in behaving in that role (Shaw, 1985). Kelly models social action in terms of two more corollaries to his fundamental postulate. His “commonality corollary: to the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological, processes are similar to those of the other person” (Kelly, 1955, p.90) captures the cognitive commonalities that constitute a culture. His “sociality corollary: to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person.” (Kelly, 1955, p.95) captures the capability to understand another’s culture within the framework one’s own.

CONCEPTUAL GRIDS

Kelly developed a method for eliciting the construct system of a person in a particular role or domain that focused on the dimensions of opposition of the constructs significant to acting within that role, the distinctions critical to anticipation in that domain. His method involves the selection of a range of stereotypical elements of experience characterizing the domain, and then eliciting the constructs used to classify those experiences in terms of their similarities and differences. He terms the matrix of elements classified by the constructs a conceptual grid, and describes how the network of relations between the constructs can be derived from it as a conceptual model, and how grids may be compared to derive relations between the conceptual models of different people (Kelly, 1955, p.297-308). Kelly’s (1955, ch.5) “Role Construct Repertory Test” is a conceptual grid in which the elements are various roles significant in the life of the person being tested, such as “your mother” or “the most interesting person whom you know personally,” and his generic

Conceptual grid services, such as WebGrid 5 (Gaines & Shaw, 2009), now utilize CSS and Javascript to make the elicitation and analysis processes highly customizable and readily integrated with other social network services, and the servers are completely script-driven so that all aspects of the interaction, such as the vocabulary or language used, can be modified for the purposes of particular communities and applications. This enables conceptual modeling to be integrated seamlessly with other activities on social network sites, and be made an integral component of survey methodologies. Since multimedia representations of the elements being construed can be readily incorporated, ongoing analysis is used to prompt the user with suggestions related to their previous entries, and continuously updated conceptual models are available throughout the elicitation, the interactivity and instant gratification expected of the web is well supported.

Details of the psychological foundations, methodology, technology and a range of applications are available elsewhere (Gaines & Shaw, 2009) and are best illustrated for the purposes of this chapter by a brief example as presented in the next section.

Details of methodology, technology and a range of applications are best illustrated for the purposes of this chapter by a brief example as presented in the next section.

Wikigramma in action

WEBGRID IN ACTION

To illustrate conceptual grid elicitation and analysis we will use an example from a ballroom dance community that coordinates its activities through a web site

Figure 1 shows the first screen of the conceptual grid

Figure 6 shows the screen when she is ready to finish after entering another seven constructs. She has also entered two more elements: “bolero” to reduce a match between the constructs “standard—latin and “keep flat —rise and fall”, and “west coast swing” because she enjoys dancing it.

Figure 6 Main WebGrid screen after eleven constructs have been elicited

At any time during the elicitation process the user can click on one of the analysis buttons and see the conceptual model resulting from the grid that has been entered so far. Figure 7 shows a hierarchical cluster model of jazzlady’s construct system generated when she clicks on the “Cluster” button.

Jazzlady has enjoyed thinking about the dances that she enjoys in her ballroom dancing, has developed models to explore how she construes them, and has identified the relations between the distinctions she makes in her conceptual framework and those of others. Her experience in doing so has had the usual rich interaction and immediate gratification she expects from the web. She has incidentally learnt to use the WebGrid functionality and would be happy to undertake another grid elicitation on the more controversial topics and choices about which the organizing committee would like to survey members, or to answer those questions directly as part of her WebGrid interaction.

Rep 5 (Gaines & Shaw, 2009), the suite of conceptual modeling tools of which WebGrid is part, also contains RepSocio, a tool for analyzing multiple grids. Figure 10 shows a sociocognitive network derived by comparing ten conceptual grids elicited by WebGrid

The socionets tool displays this weighted directed graph, allowing a threshold to be specified such that an edge will only be displayed if the match it represents is at or above that threshold. In Figure 10 the threshold control is at the bottom left and enables a minimum match to be typed in, or the match adjusted by clicking on the arrows to left and right of it to lower the threshold and increase the number of edges shown, or raise it and reduce them. The check box specifies whether the edge weights will be shown on the graph. The graph shown has the threshold set at the highest level at which all nodes are connected.

We term the graph a sociocognitive network rather than a social network because it represents the shared meanings (Batchelder, 2002; Fuhse, 2009) between participants in a social network rather than their behavioral interactions. Sociocognitive network models provides additional information to behavioral studies and, together, the two types of structure provide a multi-dimensional model (Chopra & Wallace, 2000;

For example, the strong mutual linkage of loretta and wallflower in Figure 10 does not indicate they are interacting strongly, but that, if they did so, they would understand one another, at least on the topic of the relations between different dances. The links in a sociocognitive network may correspond to the shared meanings of those who are already interacting, or the potential or power to interact of those who have not so far done so.

ADDITIONAL READING AND ACCESS TO TOOLS

A good entry point for the background sociological literature is Gilbert’s (1992) book On Social Facts which, while primarily targeted on her arguments for treating collectives as individuals, also surveys the relevant sociological literature. The collective stance she advocates is a useful framework for data mining in social networks and the extended web version of (Gaines, 1994) illustrates its applicability to many aspects of information

For those primarily interested in using the tools described, or implementing similar ones: The software manuals and tutorials for Rep 5 and WebGrid are accessible at http://repgrid.com technology. Good introductions to collective sense-making and knowledge processes in organization are provided in (Weick, 1995) and (Gaines, 2003).

CONCLUSIONS

Sociocognitive inquiry is a framework for targeted studies of the cognitive structures underlying social network activity. It is based on a family of techniques for eliciting conceptual models from web communities through their direct participation in an interactive web-based experience that has immediate payback to those individuals participating. It complements techniques for passive data mining of the by-products of web-based community activities, allowing the phenomena modeled through data mining to be investigated in greater depth, and provides an attractive alternative to, or component of, conventional web-based surveys. This chapter has outlined the relevant background in cognitive sociology and psychology, provided a case study to illustrate how web-based conceptual modeling services can be customized to integrate with in the same way as that of jazzlady.