Systematic Sociological Introspection

Systematic sociological introspection refers to the process of thinking about thinking and feeling about feeling in a focused way in order to examine the lived experiences of the self. It is the primary method connected with autoethnographic writing, where researchers write about their bodies, thoughts, and feelings in evocative narratives that invite readers to experience their experiences. Systematic sociological introspection relies on ethnographic guidelines for recording and writing about experience and on phenomenological and sociological understanding for contextualizing and interpreting what that experience means. This entry focuses on the history of introspection in sociology and on the development and application of systematic sociological introspection in autoethnographic research.

Sociological insight has been built on the introspective methods of its forebears in philosophy and psychology. Yet modern theorists often have neglected Charles H. Cooley's affective orientation and introspective method for George H. Mead's more cognitive emphasis and technique of understanding humans by studying what they do. The rejection of introspection as a technique, along with the neglect of introspection as an object of study in the form of thoughts and feelings, came from the idea that sociology should define as its territory rational action and social facts that exist outside of individual consciousness.

Sociologists also reacted against introspection because they viewed it as a psychological process that implied self-contained internal events. But the psychological approach ignored the socially constructed, processual nature of thoughts, feelings, and introspection. Viewed as process, introspection, like any thinking, is covert communicative behavior. As private, inner dialogue, it is enabled by publicly shared significant symbols and thus is inherently social. Psychologists who used introspection presented it as an inward activity, a way to investigate how an individual mind had constructed the world. Psychology deemphasized the self-dialogue inherent in introspection, underplayed the impact of shared symbols on people's response to their selves in inner conversation, and excluded the role of external norms and social structure.

Nevertheless, the gate in sociology never has been closed entirely to introspection. Some sociological traditions have maintained that understanding the meaning of one's own experience and empathically interpreting meaning in the experience of others constitute bases for inquiry. For example, Charles H. Cooley advocated sympathetic introspection, a process by which one comes to understand others by sympathetically ascribing to them one's own response in similar situations. Ethnographic, feminist, hermeneutic, and social constructionist approaches continue laying the groundwork for investigating emotions, thoughts, and subjective meaning.

In the past two decades, interpretive social scientists, such as Arthur Bochner, Norman Denzin, Carolyn Ellis, H. L. Goodall, Ronald Pelias, and Laurel Richardson more openly and passionately have embraced subjectivity as both a subject of study and a vital part of the methods for studying self and social life. Carolyn Ellis, for example, argues that introspection is a social process as well as a psychological one. Introspection is actively thinking about one's thoughts and feelings; it emerges from social interaction; it occurs in response to bodily sensations, mental processes, and external stimuli as well as affecting [Page 854]these same processes. It is not just listening to one's voice arising alone in one's head; usually, it consists of interacting voices, which are products of social forces and roles.

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