A picture is worth a thousand words: Social identity mapping as a way of visualizing and assessing social group connections

Traditionally, selfhood has been understood with reference to individual characteristics, such as personality traits or intellectual capacity. More recently, psychologists have recognized that the self is also structured by a person’s social context - in particular, by their membership of social groups. Building on this insight, work in the social identity tradition has sought to understand and measure both the formation of social identities and their consequences. The present chapter explores the value of a new tool designed to provide a pictorial representation of a person’s social identities: social identity mapping (SIM). Deployed either online (oSIM) or with paper (pSIM), mapping is designed to yield a rich source of social psychological data for both researchers and practitioners. This chapter describes delivery methods, provides a psychometric review of the tool’s quantitative data output, and explores ways in which the tool can qualitatively support clinical, educational, and organisational interventions.