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Self Observation

In: Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life: Working with Everyday

Life Materials

By: Svend Brinkmann

Pub. Date: 2014

Access Date: July 21, 2021

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd

City: London

Print ISBN: 9780857024763

Online ISBN: 9781473913905

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473913905

Print pages: 65-82

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that the pagination of the

online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473913905

Self Observation

As living human beings, we all have the capacities for self observation. As language users, we also have

the capacity to conceptualise and reflect upon the ways we observe ourselves, and we can communicate

our self observations to others. Artists and human and social scientists alike make use of these capacities.

Great novelists have provided us with detailed accounts based on self observation, and a systematic use of

the capacities for self observation is central to many disciplines in the human and social sciences. Obviously,

it is also central to everyday life research as conceived in this book. This chapter addresses the practice

of self observation by taking a phenomenological perspective in a broad sense. We thus begin in the

phenomenological leg of the triangle in Figure 2.1, but I shall also broaden the phenomenological scope to

include other aspects as well.

The chapter addresses the subject or the self that is engaged in everyday life analyses by tackling issues

about the what, the who, and the how of self observation. Concerning the what, it is crucial for an

understanding of self observation to make clear what one wants to observe. Obviously, self observation

involves an observation of the self. All empirical sciences from astronomy to sociology involve observing

selves, i.e., scientists who observe processes and properties of the world. Essential to self observation,

however, is the fact that the self is both subject and object in the process of observation. Thus, the self that

observes is also the self that is observed. This, evidently, has generated a lot of discussion and critique of

self observational methods in the history of psychology and other social sciences, mainly under the heading

of introspection. Can reports based on self observation be reliable and valid? The main methodological

problems in introspection are twofold: first, there is the problem of intersubjectivity (how can other people

know and check that the introspective person reports correctly?); and, second, there is what we may call the

problem of mediation (doesn't the activity of introspection itself unavoidably mediate and thereby change the

psychological reality that is observed?).

The discussion of these questions, however relevant they are, has led to a neglect of a more fundamental

issue, which may, incidentally, lead us to a clearer view of these other problems. This is the question of

the self as such. What is the self that observes and is observed in self observation? This is the first and

most fundamental question to be addressed below, and this discussion represents a bridge between the

philosophical anthropology of the knower that was developed in previous chapters and the more empirical

chapters that follow. The other questions that I shall address concern who observes in self observation, where

a relevant distinction emerges between direct and indirect self observation, and, finally, how one proceeds

in practice to conduct research based on self observations. Unlike later chapters, this one also gives an

introduction to more mainstream methodologies of self observation that are related to the interpretative-

pragmatic approach of the present book.

The Phenomenological Traditions

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Before moving on to these sets of questions, I shall begin by explaining how this chapter relates to

the phenomenological traditions. According to Amedeo Giorgi, a leading phenomenological psychologist,

phenomenology is ‘the study of the structure, and the variations of structure, of the consciousness to which

any thing, event, or person appears’ (Giorgi, 1975, p. 83). Phenomenology was founded as a philosophy by

Edmund Husserl around 1900 and further developed as an existential philosophy by Martin Heidegger, and

then in an existential and dialectical direction by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The subject

matter of phenomenology began with consciousness and experience, was expanded to include the human

life world, and to take account of the body and human action in historical contexts by Merleau-Ponty and

Sartre. The goal in Husserlian phenomenology was to arrive at an investigation of essences, i.e., to describe

the essential structures of human experience from a first-person perspective. Phenomenology was then a

strict descriptive philosophy, employing the technique of reduction, which means to suspend one's judgement

as to the existence or non-existence of the content of an experience. The reduction is often pictured as a

‘bracketing’, an attempt to place the common sense and scientific foreknowledge about the phenomena within

parentheses in order to arrive at an unprejudiced description of the essence of the phenomena (Kvale &

Brinkmann, 2008, p. 27). So, a phenomenologist can study the experience of shame (which I shall use as a

recurrent example in this chapter) without taking a stand on the issue whether there is a reason to feel shame

in a given situation, or whether shame is correlated with this or that neurochemical process or physiological

response. The subject's experience is the important phenomenological reality.

The concept of the life world eventually became central to Husserl. He introduced the concept in 1936 in

The Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl, 1954) to refer to the shared and intersubjective meaningful

world in which humans conduct their lives and experience significant phenomena. It is a pre-reflective and

pre-theorised world in which shame is a way of being-in-the-world, a meaningful response to certain events,

before it (shame) may be explained with reference to its neurochemical correlates or by other objectifying

means. If shame did not appear to human beings as an experienced phenomenon, a meaningful, yet painful,

phenomenon in their life world, there would be no reason to investigate it scientifically, for there would in a

sense be nothing to investigate. There is thus a primacy of the life world as experienced since this is prior to

the scientific theories we may formulate about it. This was well expressed by Merleau-Ponty:

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular

point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be

meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we

want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning

and scope, we must begin by re-awakening the basic experiences of the world of which science is

the second order expression. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. ix)

Using a metaphor, we can say that when we are concerned with how humans live their everyday lives, the

sciences may give us maps, but the world of everyday life is the territory or the geography of our lives. Maps

make sense only on the background of the territory, where human beings act and live, and should not be

confused with it. Phenomenologists are not against scientific abstractions or ‘maps’, but they insist on the

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primacy of concrete descriptions of experience – of that which is prior to maps and analytic abstractions.

This means that self observation comes to matter not simply as some additional peripheral methodology, but

rather as one of the central means of accessing the lived territory of everyday life. The only instrument that is

sensitive enough to grasp the intersubjective and meaningful realm of the life world is an observing self that

must itself be understood as a part of what is observed and described.

What initially looks like a paradox – that the self that observes is the self that is observed – turns out to

be a precondition for knowledge of the life world, since the life world can only be known ‘from within’, by

a participating self. How can one understand the experience of shame, to stay with this example, without

understanding the existential situations in which the self is painfully revealed to the gazes of others – e.g.

when one is caught looking through a keyhole? The answer is that no scientific perspective that transcends

the life world and the first-person perspectives within it (e.g. from the neurosciences) can ever grasp the

experience of shame. Surely, we can study the level of stress in situations of shame by measuring hormone

levels in the blood, for example, but this does not tell us what shame is as a meaningful, experienced

phenomenon in the life world. Shame and other such human phenomena can only be understood from an

immanent position within ‘the whole hurly-burly of human actions’, as Wittgenstein once put it (1981, no. 567),

and this is where self observation turns out to be not only legitimate, but likely the only adequate method of

inquiry.

The Self That Is Observed

I shall now address the what of self observation: What is the object of self observation? In a sense, the

answer is obvious: It is the self, but what is this? When one observes oneself in introspective studies, the self

is often implicitly seen as something ‘inner’, as an inner experiential realm or a ‘Cartesian theatre’ in which

mental objects appear. Costall (2007) has criticised this conception as a ‘windowless room’, which is part of a

more comprehensive epistemology, according to which we cannot be in direct contact with our surroundings.

According to the alternative view to be presented below, we – including our ‘selves’ – are indeed both in and

of the world, and self observation is just as much a matter of observing ourselves acting, living and interacting

as it is a matter of inwards introspection.

Rom Harré's (1998) distinction between three uses of the concept of self is helpful in outlining the what of self

observation. First, we can think of the self as a standpoint from which one observes. Harré calls this Self 1.

Secondly, we can conceive of the self as the totality of attributes of a person, which includes ideas about what

sort of person one is, and this – Self 2 – can also be radicalised by following William James's perspective on

the self as ‘the sum total of all that [someone] CAN call his’ (James, 1890, p. 279), which, for James, includes

clothes, family, friends, reputation, and material objects. From this perspective, self observation includes a

careful study of the symbolic and material resources that make up the self. Thirdly, we can approach the self

in line with the pragmatist G.H. Mead as an interactional self, or a Self 3. Here, self observation is primarily

concerned with observing the self in social interaction guided by norms, and recording one's own reactions

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(this method has been used, for example, by Stanley Milgram and Harold Garfinkel, as we shall see below).

I shall say a few words about each self conception in turn, as they are not just relevant to self observation in

the narrow sense, but also to wider issues relating to qualitative inquiry in everyday life, and I return to them

later in the book.

Self 1

Harré's notion of Self 1 is close to the phenomenological understanding of the consciousness of the first-

person perspective. Harré writes that to have a sense of self ‘is to have a sense of one's location, as a person,

in each of the several arrays of other beings, relevant to personhood’ (1998, p. 4). This sense of location

relates fundamentally to occupying a location in space from which one perceives and acts in the material

environment, but I believe that it can also refer more broadly to one's sense of being someone in a social

environment. When someone describes what it feels like to be ashamed (e.g. that it feels like shrinking and

being naked in the presence of others), then she is articulating that description from a Self 1 perspective, i.e.,

from the perspective of someone who experiences the world from this specific standpoint. Self 1 is also close

to the pragmatists' (James, Mead) idea of the I, the self as subject, i.e., the impulsive, agentive side of the

self as something other than the Me, the self as object.

Self 2

Self 2 is close to James's and Mead's notion of the Me, i.e., that phase of the individual's life process that

occurs when the self appears as an object to itself with certain properties. Self 2 is the totality of attributes

of a person, including that person's beliefs about herself. This is often conceptualised as the self-concept in

psychology. Mead was clear that the self, as that which can be an object to itself, is a social entity arising

in social experience (Mead, 1962, p. 140). A person can only have beliefs about herself because she has

acquired the capacity to look at herself from the outside, which is a capacity that develops in social situations.

We learn to objectify ourselves by taking the attitudes of others towards ourselves. And we need a language,

itself a social tool, in order for us to entertain reflective beliefs about ourselves, so Self 2 is also a social

product in this sense.

Self 2, as the beliefs one has about oneself, will often be articulated in narrative form, for the kind of self

understanding that this sense of self implies manifests itself in the stories we tell about ourselves. Thus,

someone does not think of herself as having done something shameful out of the blue, but there will always

be a story to tell that frames a certain shameful incidence within a narrative structure with a plot. When

such stories become particularly salient for an individual's self understanding, they may even constitute what

narrative psychologists call a personal myth that make up a person's identity (McAdams, 1997). As part of Self

2, we should also include the material resources that are available to a person in her life and which enable her

life processes. As I said with reference to James, this includes the sum total of all that someone can call his

(or hers). We literally study ourselves when we begin to analyse the material objects that we possess. These

are often extensions of the self's capabilities (glasses, computers, notebooks, etc.) or social identity (clothes,

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car, house) and are in that sense co-constitutive of the person's attributes. While Self 1 is phenomenological,

related to the experience leg of the ontological triangle (Figure 2.1), Self 2 is related to the object leg of the

triangle (see also Figure 4.1 below).

Figure 4.1 The ontological triangle of the self

Self 3

The third use of the concept of self that is relevant for self observation refers to the sort of person that we are

taken to be by others (Harré, 1998, p. 177). Although all self concepts have social aspects, this is therefore

the most directly social side of the self, and we are here moving towards the discursive leg of Figure 2.1.

There may be discrepancies between the self that I intend to make manifest in what I say and do, and the self

that others see in my actions and speech. ‘I am not crazy!’ is a classic example of a sentence that may sound

quite different to the person who utters it, and the psychiatrists who hear it, perhaps after having decided

that the speaker is a psychotic patient. On a less dramatic note, people may interpret a person's reaction

in a given situation as one of shame, whereas the person herself is unable to see anything shameful in the

situation, but simply acts timidly – or vice versa. Obviously, there is also sometimes consistency between how

a person understands herself and how she is taken up by others.

The point is here that the self – as Self 3 – is an interactional and conversational process. Like utterances, the

self makes personal impressions on others, who then use these impressions to interpret the person and act in

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return. This process is dialogical in that each interpretation and act must be seen as a response to what went

before in the process. There is a flow in our everyday lives that cannot be understood if we cut the episodes

up into separate units. This notion of dialogical flow has methodological implications for self observation, since

it underlines the importance of attending to the socio-temporal context within which something occurs or is

done. It is not enough to observe something here and now without including the temporal background that

enables something to appear in a certain way in the foreground. Again, as I argued in the first chapter, shame

does not simply happen, but is done in dialogical encounters between persons in mundane social situations.

The three concepts of the self are included here to remind us that self observation can be many different

things depending on which aspects of the self researchers intend to capture. They are included as legs in

the ontological triangle in Figure 4.1 below. If we want to study how people experience shame as a life world

phenomenon, we can try to describe as closely as possible what it feels like to experience this emotion

from the first-person perspective as it happens (Self 1) (e.g. through the Experience Sampling Method to be

addressed below). We can also ask people to look at themselves and inform us of situations in which they

felt shame, i.e., we can get them to talk about their ‘shameful selves’ as quasi-objects with certain attributes

(Self 2), which is what we often do in formal research interviewing. Alternatively, we can observe the social-

discursive negotiations of emotions like shame in everyday life (Self 3) by studying how others ascribe this

emotion to people (e.g. to ourselves as researchers) or how people refuse to accept some incidence as

shameful. It is perfectly legitimate to combine these approaches in qualitative research projects in everyday

life, and I even think that an argument can be made that the most comprehensive understanding of some life

world phenomenon (such as shame) would include perspectives from all three angles on the self. In relation

to shame, three guiding questions would then be:

• Self 1: How does shame feel, how is it experienced? (This is the experience leg.)

• Self 2: How is shame understood by people, e.g. how does shame enter their self-defining stories?

(This is the object leg concerned with the self-concept.)

• Self 3: How are people taken up by others as shameful, how is shame negotiated discursively? (This

is the discourse leg.)

I have now introduced a distinction between different ways of answering the ‘what’ question in self observation

studies of everyday life. The ‘what’ that is observed (oneself) may be conceived as one's consciousness,

location or point of view (Self 1), one's sense of having a set of attributes, including self conceptions and

belongings (Self 2), or one's participation in conversations and practices where the self is constituted by the

impressions that one person makes on another (Self 3). The data in self observation studies can come from

all three sources.

Who Observes in Self Observation?

The next question to address is the ‘who’ in self observation. Who should observe? Here, we can distinguish

between direct and indirect self observation. Direct self observation is when the researcher takes her own

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self and experiences as subject matter. This is foundational for the idea of qualitative inquiry in everyday life

as presented in this book. Because the other chapters do not address issues that have to do with recruiting

other research participants and using their observations, I shall say a little bit in this chapter about indirect

self observation.

Indirect Self Observation

Indirect self observation is when informants (e.g. assistants, students, or others) are recruited as self

observers. Observers may be trained or not, depending on the kind of reports that the researcher is interested

in. A significant historical instance of a large self observation study with non-trained participants is the

Mass-Observation Archive established in Britain in 1937, intended to create a ‘people's anthropology’, where

several hundred ordinary people from Britain volunteered to keep daily diaries about their everyday lives (see

Zittoun & Gillespie, 2010, for a description of this archive and an analysis based on a close reading of one

diarist).

Indirect self observation is advocated in a number of methodologies, where the idea is to accumulate data

from a representative sample (Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007; Rodriguez & Ryave, 2002). If we

want to know how young people in general feel during a day at school, how their moods and motivations

fluctuate, or when they feel shame, and if we are interested in charting possible common patterns in these

fluctuations, then it is necessary to recruit a number of participants that are representative of this part of the

population.

When one uses participants, it is important to instruct them in how to observe. If they have been told to

observe specific events or processes in their everyday lives, then they should try as much as possible to go

about their daily lives without acting differently because of the assignment (Rodriguez & Ryave, 2002, p. 16).

It is also a good idea to instruct participants not to judge (e.g. morally) the phenomenon that one is interested

in as it occurs. Needless to say, this may be artificial and cannot always be maintained without destroying the

phenomenon itself (it is hard not to judge oneself when feeling shame, for example, since a certain form of

judgemental relation to oneself seems to be intrinsic to this emotion). Still, Ryave and Rodriguez recommend

that participants are told something like the following: ‘Once you notice it [the topic] is happening: do not judge

it, do not slow down, do not speed up, do not change it, do not question it – just observe it’ (pp. 16–17).

Hence, participants should try to be as descriptive (rather than analytical) as possible when reporting their

self observations (e.g. on a report sheet), and the idea is to make them write the report immediately after a

relevant event. Researchers can favourably prepare participants with training exercises.

Direct Self Observation

Direct or researcher-based self observation has a long history in psychology and the social sciences, ranging

from early introspective studies to more recent studies of driving to work (Anthony Wallace), daydreams

(Jerome Singer), playing jazz piano (David Sudnow) and other forms of systematic sociological introspection,

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as Carolyn Ellis calls them (Ellis, 1991) (see Rodriguez & Ryave, 2002, for these and more references to self

observation studies). The studies cited here are relatively unobtrusive in people's everyday lives, but some

researchers have also developed ways of intervening quasi-experimentally in social life, acting as their own

subjects. The most famous of these is Harold Garfinkel, who developed the so-called ‘breaching experiments’

as part of his ethnomethodological investigations. In one variety of these, Garfinkel asked his students (here

acting as researchers) to engage in ordinary conversations and insist that the person clarify the sense of

commonplace remarks:

(S) Hi, Ray. How is your girl friend feeling?

(E) What do you mean, ‘How is she feeling?’ Do you mean physical or mental?

(S) I mean how is she feeling? What's the matter with you? (He looked peeved.)

(E) Nothing. Just explain a little clearer what do you mean?

(S) Skip it. How are your Med School applications coming?

(E) What do you mean, ‘How are they?’

(S) You know what I mean.

(E) I really don't.

(S) What's the matter with you? Are you sick? (Garfinkel, 1967, pp. 42–43)

‘S’ is the subject and ‘E’ is the ‘experimenter’, deliberately breaching the ordinary production of social order

in this piece of everyday interaction with the aim of understanding the normativities that are tacitly taken for

granted (until they are broken). Such conversational experiments highlight the background expectancies that

are rarely thematised in everyday life, and a typical result of Garfinkel's breaches was bewilderment, unease,

anxiety, and even anger on behalf of the conversationalists, including the researcher.

It is perhaps less known that Stanley Milgram (famous for his psychological obedience experiments)

conducted similar experiments in the 1970s, e.g. in a New York subway car, where he would ask another

passenger for his seat in order to study the maintenance of social norms. Milgram recorded the number

of passengers who gave him their seats (for no reason other than being asked), but his qualitative self

observations are equally important. This is seen in the following account by Milgram:

I approached a seated passenger and was about to utter the magical phrase. But the words

seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge. I stood there frozen, then retreated, the

mission unfulfilled. My student observer urged me to try again, but I was overwhelmed by paralyzing

inhibition. I argued to myself: ‘What kind of craven coward are you? You told your class to do it.

How can you go back to them without carrying out your own assignment?’ Finally, after several

unsuccessful tries, I went up to a passenger and choked out the request, ‘Excuse me sir, may I have

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your seat?’ A moment of stark anomic panic overcame me. But the man got right up and gave me

the seat. A second blow was yet to come. Taking the man's seat, I was overwhelmed by the need

to behave in a way that would justify my request. My head sank between my knees, and I could feel

my face blanching. I was not role-playing, I actually felt as if I were going to perish. Then the third

discovery: as soon as I got off the train, at the next station, all the tension disappeared. (Milgram,

1992, p. xxiv)

This wonderful phenomenologically precise and evocative passage has also been analysed by Valsiner

(2006), and it is a good example of a self observation report that captures many aspects of the self in a

‘breaching’ everyday life situation. Few people would find a reason to argue against the trustworthiness and

merit of such an account. Just as it is relevant to recruit and train participants for specific purposes (to do with

representativeness) in some projects, it is equally relevant for other purposes to develop one's own skills of

self observation and reporting as a researcher in order to attain a level of clarity and precision like Milgram's.

This is particularly the case when it is analytic depth (rather than representative breadth) that one is after

as researcher. It is difficult to imagine that participants, who are not researchers, could approach the level of

precision and theoretical relevance that Milgram demonstrates in the quote above.

How Does One Practise Self Observation?

I will now introduce three more specific ways of answering the ‘how’ question in different approaches to self

observation that have been cultivated in different methodologies. These are:

• ESM (Experience Sampling Method): A systematic phenomenology of the stream of consciousness

in everyday life, which is meant to be suitable for quantification.

• SSO (Systematic Self-Observation): Useful for depicting the self in hidden and elusive social

situations, primarily based on narrative reports.

• CAP (Creative Analytical Practices): An impressionistic and artful approach to self observation with

a focus on autoethnography and writing as a method of inquiry.

CAP is closest to this book's general philosophy, and SSO may also be useful for researchers who are

looking for ways of studying their lives in a social world. ESM, by contrast, is much closer to what we may

call mainstream social science, and I have included it here to demonstrate one possible bridge between

qualitative inquiry and quantification. CAP represents the least mechanised ‘how’ of self observation, which

I return to in different ways in later chapters (particularly Chapter 8), while ESM is extremely standardised in

comparison, and SSO falls somewhere in between. ESM is useful primarily in relation to Self 1 studies, while

SSO is most useful concerning Self 2 and Self 3. CAP approaches can be more freely used for a number of

purposes in qualitative inquiry in everyday life.

The Experience Sampling Method

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The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) has been developed and practised since the 1970s by Mihalyi

Csikszentmihalyi and co-workers. In a recent comprehensive book on the method, they describe it as a

‘systematic phenomenology’ (Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007, p. 4). Building on Husserl's ‘pure

phenomenology’, they use the tools of mainstream psychological investigations, including technologies (such

as signalling devices), research designs and statistics, to develop ESM. This systematic phenomenology is

meant to capture the events occurring in the stream of consciousness over time, and, with its focus on Self 1

– the contents of consciousness – it departs from the focus on the self in social situations (Self 2 and 3) that

we find in Systematic Self-Observation (to be addressed below). The idea is to achieve the highest degree

of immediacy possible by asking people (normally recruited participants who are non-researchers) to provide

written responses to a set of questions at several random points throughout each day of a week (p. 6). The

self observer is prompted to provide the response by a signalling device (e.g. a pager), and experience is

thus ideally sampled the moment it occurs. Thereby, the proponents of the method argue that the distortions

of experience associated with the use of retrospective accounts (e.g. the diaries used by CAP researchers)

are avoided.

ESM studies are particularly well suited to investigate daily fluctuations in motivations, moods or subjective

well-being, and can thus be used to identify the typologies of experience that arise during the day. One can

say that the Husserlian life world is captured in bits and pieces throughout a number of days in a person's

life. ESM scholars argue that the rather time-consuming work that is needed to build a good database will

quickly pay off, as one can continually go back to the data and find new and surprising structures in them for

years. And even small studies with five or ten participants may prove sufficient to be used reliably in simple

statistical analyses.

How is an ESM study carried out in practice? Obviously, one should begin by considering whether one's

research problem fits this methodology. ESM is designed to capture individuals' representations of experience

as it occurs (Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007, p. 32). It can favourably be used ‘to measure

dimensions of experience that are likely to be context-dependent’ (p. 32) and that fluctuate over a day or

a week. Questions such as ‘How do you feel about yourself right now?’ are highly relevant in ESM studies

whereas questions like ‘How do you generally feel about yourself?’ are better suited to qualitative research

interviewing, for example. It is important to consider the signalling schedule. Most ESM studies use signal-

contingent sampling, where participants respond to a signal (often randomised). But it is also possible to use

interval-contingent (responses are expected at the same time every day) or event-contingent (a self-report is

completed following certain specified events) forms of sampling. It should normally not take participants more

than one or two minutes to complete the form (p. 49).

When the data are in, they should be coded, and the authors recommend developing a codebook that targets

both the external coordinates of experience (e.g. date, time, location) and the internal ones (here Likert scales

are often used). Then the data should be analysed, and the analytic options are legion. Pure qualitative

approaches can be used that focus on the life of a single respondent (or a single kind of situation found in the

material), and statistical analyses can be used to calculate correlations between a number of variables. This,

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however, is hardly in line with the original phenomenological ambition to go to ‘the things themselves’ (one of

Husserl's famous credos) rather than scientific abstractions. I will refer the reader to the ESM method book

for details about different forms of analysis.

Kahneman and colleagues refer to ESM as the ‘gold standard’ in the field (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade,

Schwartz & Stone, 2004, p. 1777), and it is true that the use of ESM has resulted in interesting research

reports. That said, however, I believe that ESM has drifted quite far away from its phenomenological

background and its ambition to study ‘the flow in everyday life’ (Hektner, Schmidt & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007,

p. 286). First, there is often (although not necessarily) a quantification of people's experiences built into the

forms that are given to participants, which may not be true to the qualitative world of human experience.

Consequently, most ESM studies proceed by studying statistical averages, which may give us fascinating

demographical facts, but say little of human experience in the life world. When we are told, for example,

that on average, close to a fourth of a person's waking hours are spent in solitude (p. 280), we do not

know whether and how this applies to individual human beings or how it in fact is experienced. The problem

is, in technical terms, that most social and psychological phenomena are non-ergodic; this means that the

individual's variability of the psychological flow over time is not structurally identical to the inter-individual

variation within a population (Salvatore & Valsiner, 2010, p. 821). The flow and flux of an individual life

is simply of a different order from the flow and flux that pertains to inter-individual processes that can be

captured statistically. The rather mechanical and quantitative approach of ESM may, however, have the

advantage of persuading people to study experience in at least a quasiphenomenological way which would

otherwise not have been attracted to such a research method from fear that it would become too subjectivist.

Other problems of ESM include what could be called a ‘fetishization of the present’, as if human experience

must be captured the moment it occurs in order to be valid, as purely and unmediated as possible, with

the risk of overlooking the temporal and mediated nature of much, if not most, of our experience. ESM

researchers are sceptical of the diary method, for example, but why should the mediated externalisation of

thought processes in diaries be less true to human experience than the ‘inner experience’ reported in ESM

forms? (On the use of diaries, see Zittoun & Gillespie, 2010.)

Finally, the implicit philosophical position in ESM seems to be rather mentalistic in the sense that its

proponents typically address self observational data as ‘contents of mind’ (Hektner, Schmidt &

Csikszentmihalyi, 2007, p. 6). The human mind is seen as a storehouse of mental phenomena, a Cartesian

theatre or a ‘windowless room’ (Costall, 2007). ESM is thus designed to observe the mental entities that

reside in the storehouse, theatre or room, but this spatial understanding of mental phenomena is far from the

sophisticated approaches developed by Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who stressed the inherent

intentionality and world-directedness of the mind.

Systematic Self-Observation

Systematic Self-Observation (SSO) has been developed as a rigorous qualitative research methodology by

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Rodriguez and Ryave, mainly from a sociological perspective (Rodriguez & Ryave, 2002), and it is much

closer to this book's interest in qualitative inquiry than ESM. SSO is particularly well suited to study hidden

and elusive aspects of social life such as lies, the withholding of compliments, how individuals compare

themselves to others, and how they experience shameful emotions like envy (p. 3). A SSO topic would

preferably address a single, focused phenomenon of everyday life that is natural to a culture, and which is

noticeable, intermittent, bounded in time and of relatively short duration (p. 5). As the examples testify, SSO

has primarily been used to study the dimensions of the self that Harré called Self 2 and Self 3, perhaps

due to the sociological background of this methodology (Goffman, Garfinkel and the symbolic interactionists

are sources of inspiration). The goal of SSO is to generate field notes that are accurate descriptions of the

participants' experience in social situations (and the participants may be the researchers themselves). Unlike

ESM, SSO encourages participants to write narrative reports of their experiences immediately after they have

occurred.

A SSO study normally proceeds according to the following sequence of tasks: (1) choose a subject matter

appropriate to the methodology, (2) formulate the topic, (3) recruit informants, (4) guide the informants to

understand the logic of social science, (5) teach informants to observe in a sensitive way, (6) teach them to

report observations in a detailed and accurate manner, and (7) prepare the informants with training exercises

(Rodriguez & Ryave, 2002, p. 10). A lot of emphasis is put on training informants from the conviction that

good data are completely dependent on the informants' skills. When the qualitative researcher herself is

also the informant, many of these steps will already have been taken; at least if the researcher has been

educated in qualitative inquiry. After these steps, however, comes the process of reading the collected

material analytically, ordering them, making typologies and choosing typical, critical or extreme cases to

report, depending on one's research interests.

In many of the reported studies that use SSO, the data are in the form of short conversational sequences. In

a study of lies in everyday life, an observed sequence can be reported like this:

First Instance

Place: In a parking lot outside a high school.

Who: Basketball friend and myself.

Situation: Standing by our cars talking about nothing.

Friend: We play tomorrow in Pacific Palisades. Why don't you come see us play?

Me: Oh really? What time do you play?

Friend: We play at 7:30 on Friday. You should come down if you get a chance.

Me: Okay, I'll be there [Lie]. (Rodriguez & Ryave, 2002, p. 30)

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This is not the place to unfold the authors' specific findings concerning lies, but they argue rather convincingly

that lying emerges primarily from the general features of everyday social interaction. All informants in

the study lied, and most lies occurred spontaneously, and although this goes against our common-sense

understanding of lies as immoral, lying often seemed to be a preferred action according to the normative

conventions of social interaction. In short, lying was found to be a pervasive feature of our lives that often,

and perhaps paradoxically, serves a moral function.

There is nothing in SSO studies that prevents researchers from counting and quantifying data (see Rodriguez

& Ryave, 2002, for examples), but the methodology has its strength in the immediate qualitative descriptions,

often in narrative form, that participants can construct. Unlike ESM, which often charts people's doings and

sufferings in general during a day, week, month or so, SSO is rather more focused on specific issues, such

as telling lies, name dropping, gossiping and other similar aspects of our conversational reality. With SSO we

have a manageable method for social phenomenological studies of self observation, which is flexible enough

to suit a number of different research purposes, but which is at the same time rigorous enough for researchers

to communicate their findings in efficient ways to others who are familiar with the method.

Creative Analytical Practices

From a certain perspective, we are all engaged in self observation as we go about living our daily lives. All

of us notice from time to time how we experience and act in the world. As language users, we not only live

in the present, but we have the capacity to distance ourselves from the immediate impressions the world

makes on us, and from the immediate impulses we have to act. This distancing involves self observation

in a minimal sense and is enabled by our capacity to use language. Humans have also developed different

cultural tools and practices that aid in the process of distancing one from oneself, ranging from simple note

taking to psychotherapy. One helpful tool in self observation is the diary or journal, which has been advocated

as a qualitative research instrument by Janesick (1999) and others who work creatively with self observation

in everyday life (e.g. in autoethnography). Diaries are normally used rather unreflectively in people's lives, but

a focused use of journal writing can refine the researcher's understanding of her role as a research instrument

and also of the responses of participants (p. 506). Janesick describes how the making of lists, portraits,

maps of consciousness, guided imagery, altered points of view, unsent letters and dialogues may facilitate

the journal writer's phenomenological awareness (p. 519). Often, there is a short route from journal writing to

actual self observation analyses.

Using personal journals in the way advocated by Janesick is related to the current interest in autoethnography

(Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011) as the most visible of the Creative Analytical Practices (CAP) in qualitative

inquiry to have emerged in recent years (some of the others are investigative poetry and performance

ethnographies). Autoethnography seeks to describe and analyse (this is the ‘graphy’ aspect) personal

experience (this is the ‘auto’ aspect) in order to understand cultural processes (this is the ‘ethno’ aspect)

(p. 1). The goal is to craft aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of experience with inspiration from the

arts. Autoethnographers put emphasis on writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005)

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and are generally sceptical of more standard methodological guidelines for analysis. Some favour the use of

theoretical concepts to analyse experience – Ellis and colleagues thus refer to theoretical tools as those which

make autoethnography potentially more valid than Oprah Winfrey's talk show, for example (Ellis, Adams &

Bochner, 2011, p. 8) – while others prefer to write more descriptively, e.g. in the tradition of intimate journalism

(Harrington, 1997) (see Chapter 8).

In any case, it is difficult to present guiding principles for how to work with self observation in CAP traditions

(Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Richardson does, however, encourage researchers to do a number of

specific things. Some of the most important ones are:

1 Join a writing group

2 Work through a creative writing guidebook

3 Enrol in a creative writing workshop

4 Use ‘writing up’ field notes to expand one's writing vocabulary

5 Write an autobiography (e.g. about how one learned to write)

6 Transform field notes into drama

7 Experiment with transforming an interview or an observation into a poem

Readers are encouraged to try one or more of these. Regardless of one's understanding of CAP inquiries,

it is useful to regard writing as a mode of inquiry throughout a self observation study. Like Richardson, who

reports having been taught ‘not to write until I knew what I wanted to say’ (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p.

960), I believe that writing is a central way for qualitative researchers not just to report some findings, in the

final instance, but also to experiment with analyses, different perspectives on the textual material, and ways

of presenting, as a method of inquiry in its own right. Writing should thus be treated as an intrinsic part of the

methodology of research – and not as a final ‘postscript’ added on (I return to this later in the book).

The main conclusion that emerges from these considerations is that different self observation approaches are

suitable for different research questions. We should engage systematically and creatively in self observation

and judge the different methodological perspectives pragmatically in light of the scientific results that ensue.

CAP approaches, when done well, may give readers a deep understanding of possible human experiences,

in most cases the researcher's own, whereas ESM and SSO approaches are better suited to studies on a

larger scale that can throw light on different aspects of the self.

Beginning a Project on Self Observation

Before moving on in the next chapters to more specific kinds of everyday life materials, I would like to

conclude this chapter with a few exercises that may help you to get started on a project based on self

observation. Since self observation is particularly well suited to study elusive and hidden aspects of our

everyday lives, I will encourage you to work with topics like lies or shame. We shall go through the six steps

that I presented in Chapter 1:

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1 Choose a topic. You may choose lying or shame or something else, but it is important that

the topic is something that you can in fact observe yourself doing or experiencing in your

life. Some researchers estimate that people tell four lies on average every day (if we

include such banalities as ‘I'm fine’), and the experience of shame is also not uncommon.

Before going further, write a few words about why your chosen topic is important. Think

about the three aspects of self that were addressed above and decide whether you would

like to focus on one of these in particular, or do self observation in a way that includes

them all. Write a few words about your choice and your reasons for choosing it. Be sure

to include reflections on the ethical questions that were raised in Chapter 3.

2 Collect materials. Buy a notebook that you can carry around. Choose a specific day or

two as suitable for your research purpose. Depending on your choice of analytic

awareness, use the notebook to describe the time, place, persons and social situations

(when, where, who and what), whenever the phenomenon that you are interested in

occurs. Work with a combination of short, descriptive sentences (e.g. of when, where and

with whom something happened) and longer narratives (typically of what happened).

Experiment with dividing up the pages in your notebook, e.g. according to the distinction

between short description and longer narration. You can use Milgram's description above

as exemplary of how to draft a narrative. However, it should not take more than around

five minutes whenever you write in the notebook. It may be awkward to write in the book

immediately after something has occurred in a social situation, but you can go

somewhere in private to collect your thoughts and make your notes. It is often helpful not

just to write down what happened (e.g. when you told a lie or felt shame), but also your

thoughts about what the study of the phenomenon contributed to your life. Did it somehow

encourage lying that you had set yourself the task of observing your ‘lying self’? Or were

you able to more or less forget the task and act ‘naturally’?

3 Consult the literature. After the days of self observation are over, read your notes

carefully. You may already begin posing some analytic questions to your materials at this

stage. What is interesting about the phenomena and situations? What is puzzling? Here,

a kind of breakdown in understanding, or even ‘mystery’ (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011),

may occur, and you can try to make explicit what is mystifying about your notes, although

this may be difficult at this stage. The idea is to let the breakdown, your confusion,

surprise or wonder, direct the readings that you may do. Most often, researchers are

already familiar with theoretical literature about the subject matter, and should think

through how certain theories or paradigms would approach the phenomenon. If you know

very little about lying or shame, try to simply browse through a textbook on social

psychology (or something similar) to see if some of the discussions there can inspire you.

You should also notice if something is lacking in the literature. Do your small examples

thematise aspects that are not covered in the books?

4 Continue collecting materials. After having read about the topic of interest and juxtaposed

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the readings with your initial observations, choose another day or two and repeat the self

observation process. Now, your way of observing and understanding may have changed

because of the theoretical readings that may have sensitised you to other aspects of the

situations. Do not think of this as a source of error, but rather as a new mediation of your

experience.

5 Do analytic writing. Collect all your materials and use your theoretical tools to help you

read and analyse. Do not wait to write until the analytic process is finished, but use writing

as an analytic method of inquiry. It is not easy to explicate how to do this, but you may

use the three strategies outlined in Chapter 1 as inspiration:

• Make the obvious obvious: Is there something about lying/shame (or whatever

your topic is) that happens always or often, but which is so obvious that we

rarely notice it? Try to think counter-factually to help you notice the obvious but

unnoticed: What if your lie had been true, what if you had not felt shame, but

pride in this situation? What if you had been one of the other participants in the

situation – how do different perspectives matter?

• Make the hidden obvious: Try to ask Parker's (1996) question: What

relationships and implicit theories of self must obtain for this material (situation)

to make sense? What discourses and understandings of social life are working

in the situation that made you feel shame or tell a lie?

• Make the obvious dubious: Try to read your materials with a destabilising

intention. We think we know what a lie is, for example, but is it really that simple?

Is it really lying to say that ‘I'm fine’, even if I don't feel too good? Doesn't this

presuppose that there is some ‘truth’ about how one feels that only the speaker

has access to and that she may intentionally conceal from others? What theory

of subjectivity is involved in such a presupposition – and is there something in or

about your observations that may challenge this?

6 Publish your text. If your text is an assignment, to publish just means to hand it in, and if

it is something else, then show it to friends or colleagues and ask for their opinions. Make

sure to notice their reactions without being defensive: if they like it, what is it about your

analysis that resonates with them? And if they don't like it, you should try to understand if

there is something about your analysis that is badly crafted, or if their criticism concerns

basic paradigmatic differences. Perhaps they don't think that something like that can

count as qualitative research? After listening carefully to the criticism, you may ask them

why they are critical of this way of working, and it will often be possible to use their

feedback when working further on the paper.

Alternative Exercise

If the six steps above seem a little too much at this point, you may try a simpler observational exercise (and

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perhaps return to the exercise above after reading the rest of the book). Some helpful exercises are found

in Janesick's book on ‘Stretching Exercises’ for Qualitative Researchers (2004). Here is one variation on her

exercise called ‘Observation in the home or workplace’:

• Purpose: To develop observation skills within a setting. Observe an area in your home or workplace.

• Problem: To see your own space – and yourself in it – as you never have before.

• Time: 30 minutes.

• Activity: Select an area to observe and describe which is part of your everyday life (home/work).

Set aside 30 minutes for quiet time to describe your room or office. Initially, you should write without

stopping or censoring yourself. Describe as many details of the room as possible, including your own

presence in the room, both in the here-and-now (i.e. describe your perspective) but also historically

(we see not just physical surfaces, but also something of the history of the person who has decorated

the room, arranged the furniture, etc.). After taking notes, read them carefully, and consider how to

edit the notes and possibly integrate them into an analytic text about your observation of being-in-a-

room.

• Discussion: If you do this together with others (e.g. in class), compare and discuss your notes and

possible analytic texts. Think about what the 30 minute timeframe meant for your activity. It is a

luxury to have 30 minutes just to observe one thing, but there are still indefinitely many aspects and

properties of the room – and you in it – that escaped notice. Think about how theories and concepts

can help you notice some aspects and properties and exclude others.

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Self Observation

In: Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life: Working with Everyday Life Materials