There is currently an increasing amount of psychological research being conducted regarding self-control (Magen & Gross, 2010a). This is for a good reason. Self-control is central to many psycho-logical disorders, and especially central to the current conception of lifestyle disorders.
Since there is quite a massive interest in self-control, one could assume that there is a clear defini-tion and operationalization of the concept. This is not the case and self-control is often defined dif-ferently depending on the researcher (Kruglanski & Köpetz, 2010). Such unclear conceptualization makes integration and development of the research slow and difficult.
The goal in this paper is thus to first carefully create a definition of self-control, and from this con-duct a research review with the intend of creating suggestions to how the research may best be im-proved.
In this paper self-control is defined as: The regulation of behaviour, thoughts, and feelings, so that you follow your better judgment in the situation and over time, and thus resists temptation.
The review was conducted using the meta-theoretical perspective of contextualism, which emphas-ize holistic analysis and systematic research initiatives. The review focused on the following four research areas in self-control:
- Self-control as a resource
- Self-control as personality
- Self-control strategies and interventions
- Beliefs about self-control
After reviewing the research conducted in these areas, a contextualist discussion followed. In this it was identified that the reviewed research was not able to provide a clear picture of the self-control process, and that the research were oriented towards knowledge on a general level. These two fac-tors combined meant that the proper contextualistic usage of the research would be a general syn-thesis. This provides an overview over the general self-control process and at the same time serves as a foundation for more context-specific research, which contextualism views as necessary. Thus a contextualistic synthesis was constructed which integrated the reviewed research, with the contex-tualistic focus on holistic overview. With this it was established that self-control must have certain experiential elements, primarily regarding one‟s ability to resist future temptations, and that these elements are not well researched.
On the basis of the synthesis a research-strategy was constructed, which established how to fill the caps identified by the synthesis, and how to establish context-specific knowledge. The resulting view of the self-control phenomenon was discussed, and this projects ability to use contextualism and still utilize the existing research was reviewed.