18 - Methodological approaches to studying the self in its social context

Summary

Dialogical self theory (DST) possesses high face validity and connects with personal experience of an internal dialogue and the tensions of indecision. This chapter argues that a methodology is needed which will enable an analysis of the relation between the social and the psychological. It examines how perspectives within the social world become perspectives within the dialogical self. The chapter focuses on three distinctive approaches: the self-confrontation, the personal-position repertoire and the use of bi-plots to map internal and external I-positions. It illustrates the benefits of these methodologies in enabling us to address particular questions but also to highlight that existing methodologies do not enable us to examine the relation between the voices within the dialogical self and the actual perspectives of significant others in the social environment. The interpersonal perception method (IPM) examines the relation between what people think other people think and what those other people actually think.