Over the last year some students and I have been involved in some research into the PostSecret phenomenon. Earlier this month we presented five papers in a symposium entitled The PostSecret Phenomenon: The Psychology of Anonymous Confession at the annual Southwestern Psychological Association conference held, this year, in Kansas City, MO.
Two of the first questions we had about PostSecret were these:
#1. Are the secrets we find in PostSecret (at the PostSecret Sundays website and in the publications) typical of the secrets you and I might have? That is, is PostSecret representative of the normal population?
#2. Along these lines, is PostSecret sensationalized? That is, as a website and as a publication series PostSecret may be selectively choosing secrets that grab our attention to create more web hits or book sales.
But to answer these questions we faced a challenge. We couldn't do preliminary tests of these questions until we got a handle on the PostSecret "content" (i.e., what the secrets were about). Until the content was ballparked we couldn't move on to how the content of the PostSecret secrets might or might not be representative of the content of "real world" secrets (i.e., the secrets you or I have).
To start this process we examined the content of the three PostSecret publications that were available to us at the start of the project in June 2007: PostSecret, My Secret, and The Secret Lives of Men and Women.
We read through all these secrets and noted that, in our estimation, the secrets could be grouped into three broad areas:
Existential: Secrets related to existential themes such as life meaning/purpose, choice, regret, religious faith, and death.
Relational: Secrets involving relational issues such as fracture, unrequited love, sexuality, isolation, harmony, and romantic anxiety.
Declarative: Descriptive statements about aspects of the the self that are often considered shameful or deviant.
As you can see, after this initial sorting we had sub-codes within each category. Examples and descriptions of these sub-codes follow (click on each for a closer look):
I. Existential sub-codes:
i. Life meaning and purpose: Concerns or hopes about one's overall life purpose or the meaning or value of one's life:
ii. Choice and regret: Negative emotions related to making choices or regret over choices already made:
iii. Religious faith: Secrets related to religious faith, doubts, or loss of faith:
iv. Death: Secrets related to death anxiety or death-related concerns:
II. Relational sub-codes:
i. Fracture: Relational conflict, failure or brokenness:
ii. Unrequited Love: Expressions of love that are unfulfilled:
iii. Sexual: A secret about the sexual aspect of a relationship:
iv. Isolation: Secrets about a lack of relationality such as loneliness or alienation:
v. Romantic Anxiety: Secrets about romantic worries or preoccupations:
III. Declarative sub-codes:
The Declarative secrets are all self-descriptive statements, but these tended to fall into one of three areas:
i. Mental Health: Secrets about psychological strain (e.g., abuse) or psychological dysfunction (e.g., drug use, suicide):
ii. Sexual: Secrets about one's sexual interests or behaviors:
iii. Self-Trivia: Undisclosed facts (generally odd, bizarre, shameful or deviant in nature) about one's interests or behaviors:
With this coding complete we could examine the relative proportions of secret content found in PostSecret. This analysis revealed that the most common secrets--what we called The Big Three--were the following:
Existential : Meaning
Relational : Fracture
Declarative : Self-Trivia
That is, the most common secrets in PostSecret are secrets about:
Concerns, fears, or sadness over the meaning, purpose, direction or value of your life.
Worries, anger, or sadness over some fractured or failed relationship with a friend, parent, family member, spouse or child.
Some facet of yourself (some interest, trait, or behavior) that you've never disclosed to anyone because you fear that people will find it odd, sick, bizarre, shameful, or deviant.
In short, if PostSecret is an accurate guide (a question I'll hold over for the next post) we can expect that The Big Three would capture the majority of secrets we all keep.
Does it capture yours?
Further, what can The Big Three tell us about the human experience? That is, if our secrets do cluster in these three areas what can we learn about ourselves? And, does this have any spiritual or theological implications?
PostSecret: Part 2, The Three Biggest Secrets
Next Post: Is PostSecret Sensationalized?
