How do you measure social self concept?

Team: Dr Kasia Banas, Dr Lillian Smyth, Dr Ken Mavor

All this chit-chat about the complex system of the social self is nice and all, but how on earth do we measure it? There are existing measurement approaches for examining the social self concept in terms of group memberships (e.g. the Social Identity Mapping approach), but once the roles and relationships and emotions and locations are in the mix, we are a bit lost. If we then want to also have a peek at the content of these aspects of the self (what are you like when you’re with your soccer team? what about when you’re with your mum?), we’re fully stumped. In our previous paper (Banas & Smyth, 2021), we propose an adaptation of the Trait-Sort task from the Self Complexity literature, mixed with some self-report measures from the Social Identity Mapping literature. The Trait-Sort task and it’s indices are notoriously difficult, though, so we’ve written a tutorial.

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

Smyth, Banas & Mavor (2022)