Supports: Chapters 1, 3 and 6 Reinforces: Chapter 8
Related Concepts: self-interpretation; self-signification; interpretive integrity; patterns as hypotheses; bounded story sets; candor is rational; facilitator stance.
The book introduces self-signification early as a way to preserve participant meaning and reduce analyst overreach, then returns to it in design and testing. This article gathers that argument into one sustained line: self-interpretation as interpretive authority, why it protects authenticity, and how it keeps patterns tethered to lived logic.
When people are asked to share real experience, something subtle happens. The social contract shifts. It becomes clearer what is safe to say, who is listening, and whether anything will happen as a result.
Traditional research approaches often separate experience from interpretation. Participants provide input, and someone else assigns meaning. Even in careful qualitative work, interpretation is frequently centralized in analysts, coders, and stakeholders who did not live the experience.
Active Sensemaking changes that structure.
Self-interpretation, sometimes called self-signification, means that participants interpret their own stories. They do not merely describe what happened. They position their experience within a structured meaning space and indicate what it meant to them. This is not a stylistic choice. It is a structural choice about where interpretive authority sits.
When interpretation remains with the participant, several common analyst biases are reduced. Analysts are less likely to infer intent from tone or to guess whether a story reflects pride, frustration, ambiguity, or tension. The participant has already expressed the meaning of the experience in their own frame. The story remains a story, but it also becomes structured in a way that can be compared responsibly across many stories without flattening nuance.
This is consistent with Brenda Dervin’s sense-making tradition, which treats meaning as situated and participant-owned rather than analyst-assigned.
Self-interpretation reduces common distortions that arise when outsiders translate lived experience into categories. It helps prevent overgeneralizing from vivid anecdotes. It reduces the temptation to project an external framework onto stories that do not naturally fit it. It interrupts coding schemes that participants would not recognize. It makes it harder to collapse tension into simplified themes.
Self-interpretation does not eliminate bias. But it does redistribute interpretive power in a way that protects authenticity.
There is also a relational dimension. When people realize they are not being interpreted by others but are interpreting their own experience, candor often deepens. The internal risk calculus shifts. Sharing feels less like exposure and more like contribution. People sense that they are being treated as meaning-makers, not as data points.
This shift changes how patterns form. Because participants interpret across shared signifiers, patterns emerge from distributed meaning rather than imposed coding. Clusters are not artifacts of an analyst’s taxonomy. They are concentrations of participant-defined interpretation. That is why patterns are treated as hypotheses rather than verdicts. A visible concentration is an invitation to look closer, return to stories, and interpret together.
Self-interpretation also clarifies the role of facilitation. Facilitation is not interpreting stories for others, forcing convergence, producing consensus, or translating experience into conclusions. It is stewarding the conditions under which people can make sense of lived experience, individually and collectively, while protecting psychological safety and interpretive plurality. Self-interpretation remains intact at all times.
Spryng.io operationalizes this discipline by embedding self-signification directly into the story contribution process. Participants share narratives and then interpret them using structured signifiers such as triads, dyads, and matrices. Those interpretations are preserved as the primary analytic layer.
Pattern views surface distributions of participant meaning, and Story Packs allow direct return to bounded story sets connected to those patterns, so interpretation remains accountable to lived experience rather than drifting into abstraction. The platform is designed so that interpretive authority remains distributed rather than centralized.
In complex adaptive systems, bias often enters when interpretation is detached from lived experience. Self-interpretation narrows that gap. It does not claim neutrality. It claims accountability.
When participants retain interpretive agency, analysis becomes a collaborative act rather than an extractive one. The result is not perfect objectivity. The result is disciplined humility and a more faithful representation of the system as it is lived.
That is why self-interpretation matters. It protects interpretive plurality. It reduces analytic overreach. And it strengthens the integrity of everything that follows.
Closing
Return to Chapters 1 and 6 for the book’s framing and design implications, then to Chapter 8 for how self-interpreted meaning becomes pattern-level visibility without losing context.