Chapter 28 Self Monitoring- A Class Variable?

and explains individual differences in the (self-) control of expressive behavior: „There are, however, striking and important differences in the extent to which individuals can and do monitor their self-presentation, expressive behavior and non-verbal affective display “ (Snyder, 1974, p. 526). The SM-questionnaire developed by Snyder (1974) covers self-report items like ‘I’m not always the person I appear to be ’ that usually were analyzed in a quantitative fashion, i.e., by summing the item responses after coding all items in the same direction. In hundreds of empirical studies, however, a median-split was applied to these sum scores in order to differentiate between two groups of people, the high self monitorer and the low self monitorer. The results of those investigations strongly depend on how well two possibly different kinds of individuals, the high SM and low SM, are represented by such a fifty-fifty splitting of the sample. In the further development, the theoretical construct of SM seemed to adopt to this way of data analysis and SM explicitly changed to a type construct: „...individuals high and low in self-monitoring are guided by different meta-controls o