Sensitizing Concepts

Historical Lineage

Symbolic interactionism provides the essential epistemological source of sensitizing concepts. Herbert G. Blumer's Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method deals with sensitizing concepts. Based on approaches by pragmatist philosophers, such as James Dewey, symbolic interactionism highlights experience and interaction in particular. In understanding this experience, the researcher must grasp the meaning with which the social actors infuse their understandings and actions. Sensitizing concepts are a logical and even an essential methodological consequence of this premise.

However, it was not until the early 1950s that Blumer coined the term sensitizing concept to bridge the prevailing gap (or grave shortcomings) in the then-current theories' all-too-evident separation from the empirical world.

Sensitizing concepts offer three important benefits in qualitative research. First, they are an important methodological device with which to enter the world of meanings of a researched population. Second, they offer the means to transcend the seemingly inherent problem of accumulating unique case-specific data.

Third, they allow the researcher to pay attention to developing concepts that are empirically grounded.

Usefulness in Approaching Empirical Instances

According to Blumer, sensitizing concepts give the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances, suggesting helpful directions along which to look. Sensitizing concepts are starting points in thinking about a class of data about which the social researcher has no definite idea. A concept is usually provisional and may be dropped as a more viable and definite concept emerges in the course of research. According to this approach, meanings are best captured by using sensitizing concepts that contain the words and thoughts that research subjects use to explain their world. As a case in point, a study of northwest Icelandic fishermen shows that they regularly spoke of “going South.” This expression sensitizes the researcher to the practice employed by fishermen to negotiate policy changes in Reykjavik, Iceland's capital in the south of the country. “Going South” captures local initiatives to effect changes, the need to travel to Reykjavik—that is, from the periphery to the center—and the importance of engaging politicians and marine biologists when lobbying for change.

Potential to Transcend Unique Data

Blumer's 4,300-word essay, “What Is Wrong with Social Theory?” decries the aridity of contemporary social theory removed many times from the empirical world, treating social actors as irrelevant.

Blumer, however, had not intended sensitizing concepts to be definitive in the manner of offering a clear-cut identification of a particular class of data. For him there is an advantage in using sensitizing concepts rather than definitive ones. Because sensitizing concepts do not create closure during one's research, he thought they would be most useful in studying empirical instances. Such an inductive approach to the study of micro phenomena allows one to derive generic statements from what constitute unique data from unique settings.

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