Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-83).

Background and history. -- The critics. Sencitizing concepts as anomalies in Blumer's social scientific procedure. Sensitizing concepts as lacking in social structural dimensions. Sensitizing concepts as characterized by vagueness. Sensitizing concepts as nominal definitions. Senzitizing concepts as restricting the range for collecting data. Sensitizing concepts as going stale. -- Taking distance from the data. Folk concepts or terms. Sensitizing concepts. Sensitizing supra-concepts -- Constructing sensitizing concepts. Step 1: Deriving concepts from participants' perspective. Step 2: "Exploring" and using focus groups. Step 3: "Inspecting" and "dimensionalizing". Step 4: Relating to other social contexts. Step 5: Organizing the same family of terms. -- Cross-cultural settings. The Icelandic field setting -- Theoretical and analytical implications. Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Sociological theory. Cognate disciplines.