Cognitive processes and social identity through focused introspection

A method is presented to explore, empirically, patterns of social and personal identity: the social identity inventory (SII). The SII is based on free associations describing a person's principal group memberships (first order data). The responses obtained are used as stimuli to generate ‘second order data’ through focused introspection. The results reveal patterns of relationship between self‐representation and group representation, the differential probability of different group memberships to elicit self‐representations, and the cognitive processes underlying the natural represen‐tations of group memberships.