Verbal Reports and Decision Process Analysis

Abstract

This chapter looks at the use of verbal data in contemporary decision process research. It examines a range of approaches to the elicitation and analysis of verbal reports with the purposes of both describing decision processes and testing theories about them. The chapter aims to illustrate good practice, thereby providing researchers with the means to make good research design decisions. It describes a decision process as a transformation of a structure over time. A decision maker’s mental representation of a decision problem is such a structure, one that includes both cognitive and affective components. Basic design decision for process tracing studies eliciting verbal reports is whether responses should be structured or unstructured. The quality of concurrent verbal protocols depends on key characteristics of the decision problem, including complexity, familiarity, importance, or whether singular or repeated. Instructions given to participants with the aim of providing indicators of a decision process can be structured, semi-structured, or free.