ABSTRACT
Good science is based on good data. Psychologists as empirical scientists believe that producing and collecting data is an important phase of their work. Psychological research has used people’s writings as data for a long time. Using self-written text to learn about psychological processes requires considering it as a part of the flow of thinking that can be mediated by language, while acknowledging that it is always a reduction. Using diaries and self-writing as data has been largely overlooked in the social sciences, possibly because their status as data was problematic. Mass-Observation, established in Britain in 1937, aimed to create a “people’s anthropology” to redress the relative neglect of the perspective of ordinary people in social science. Self-writing is located at the articulation of the individual process of sense making, and of the social world with its norms and conventions.
