The research program reported in this chapter maps the contours of the self as phenomenally experienced, a terrain little explored in the vast empirical literature on the self. Traditional studies of the self have a narrow, impoverished quality because they examine a hypothetical as-if self by asking people where they would place themselves on some dimension that conventionally interests researchers without getting information on how often, if ever, people do in fact think of themselves on that dimension. In place of this hypothetical as-if self, I study the actual as-is self, identifying characteristics in terms of which persons actually do think of themselves. Participants are presented with open-ended probes (e.g., “Tell us about yourself,” “Tell us what you are not,” in McGuire & McGuire, 1991a) that allow them to describe themselves on dimensions of their own choosing. Then, by content-analyzing these free self-descriptions it can be ascertained which characteristics are spontaneously salient in people's sense of self and what determines the salience of one versus another dimension.

Our studies investigate both the contents and the processes of the phenomenal self: the contents as revealed by the nouns used in people's flowing self-description in response to probes such as “Tell us about yourself,” and the processes as revealed by the verbs used in these self-descriptions. Our noun/content studies investigate the salience and correlates in the phenomenal self of such dimensions as physical features (height, weight, etc.), demographic characteristics (ethnicity, sex, etc.), the representation of the child's school experiences in the self, and the social self (the significant others who occupy self-space).