The Sense of Certainty and the Access to Inner Experience: A Qualitative Investigation

Abstract

Questions about private experiences such as future-related thinking or anger rumination are standard repertoire in many types of psychological research. Evaluating the quality and reliability of participant reports in response to such questions is, however, a complex endeavor—especially for third-person research where observer and observed are distributed across two different individuals and disparate scales of reference may hence challenge the interpretation of findings. Reliable tools to assess an individual’s actual experience are thus needed. In the present article, we conceptually specified and empirically explored the sense of certainty as a vehicle to assess participant’s access to their experience. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 participants performing mathematical calculation, imagination, and memory tasks and cross-validated the qualitative reports with their certainty ratings. The results of the Thematic Analysis revealed affective, cognitive, somatic, and rudimentary behavioral dimensions of the sense of certainty. The qualitative data provide the basis for a sense of certainty scale that we argue can assess the sense of certainty as an internal criterion for access to inner experience in a more differentiated manner than standard rating tasks.