THE PROBLEM OF QUALITATIVE MEASUREMENTS OF THE LARGE GROUP LATENT PSYCHOLOGY

The paper reveals the author’s approach to the study of the latent psychology of large groups. The relevance of the research is caused by the necessity of the development of new methodological approaches to the study of group consciousness of socio-cultural macrophenomena – large groups (classes, strata, ethnic groups, confessional and cultural communities) that surpass today’s possibilities of screening and survey research not always allowing seeing the sources, mechanisms and the dynamics of certain phenomena. The paper covers the discussion of the possibility of qualitative measurements of the extramental content of group consciousness and their parametrization. Based on the results of various studies, the author shows the research possibilities of “jumping” into the large social groups’ psychology. Referring to the experience, methodology, and methods of the humanities – history, cultural studies and linguistics, the author brings new methodological optics to the modern social psychology of large groups enabling the more subtle analysis of the psychology of sociocultural macrophenomena. As the units of the analysis, the journalistic texts in the literary and political journal of the XIX century, the texts and individual utterances of the online conferences in the network community, the associative-verbal networks of various aspects of social consciousness in real groups, and the online discussions in social networks are considered. The paper presents such research methods as the narrative and discursive analysis, free association experiment, categorical analysis, and functional and case grammar. The author substantiates the research strategy of the work with the linguistic consciousness of the groups expressed in various communicative practices – from the arrays of texts to the certain utterances. The postnonclassical approach allows both performing the “samples” of consciousness content of various groups and tracing their dynamics considering the formation of this content, its latent semantics, and possible development trajectories, that can be implemented due to the qualitative measurements of the linguistic phenomena.