Social and Critical Psychology

Constructing a Category

Six messy fictional accounts and five decisions. By the end there is a named condition with a boundary, a questionnaire, a prevalence figure, a training course and a place in somebody's spreadsheet - and nothing new has been discovered.

Simulated - fictional accounts, a fictional survey population and an invented category

Learning objective

By the end you should be able to say where a classification acquires the appearance of a natural object, and why “socially constructed” does not mean “made up”.

About 25 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.

Construction is not fabrication

The six people describe something. They are tired, they dread opening their messages, they stay up late for an hour of quiet. Nothing in this activity suggests they are inventing it, and nothing here is a criticism of anyone who finds a category useful for naming their own experience. The question is a different one: what happens to a description once it is given a name, a threshold, an instrument and an institutional user - and what stops being asked as a result.

How to use this

  1. Read the six accounts.
  2. Commit to an answer to the question below.
  3. Work through the five stages in order. Each adds one result to the panel tracking the category you are building.
  4. At the end, go back and change one decision - the threshold is the most instructive - and watch what moves.

The material

A fictional research team collected open-ended responses to the question "Is there anything about daily life at the moment that you find difficult to put a name to?" Six of them are below. They have not been coded, grouped or tidied. This is the whole of what exists before the category does.

    All six are invented for teaching. No real respondent, dataset, survey or published category is reproduced.

    First, a judgement

    The team will turn these accounts into a category and then estimate how many people have it. What will most determine that figure?

    Challenge - five sentences about your category

    Each of these could be written about the category you have just built. Decide what each one is: a finding, a decision reported as a finding, or a claim the work cannot support at all.

    What this demonstrates

    Reification is usually taught as an attitude — treating an abstraction as a thing — and left there. Here it has steps you can point at: selecting features fixed what would count, naming imported a frame and an expert, a threshold turned a continuum into two kinds of people, and an instrument made the category prior to the experience it came from. Nobody was careless and nothing new was discovered.