Cognitive processes in Event History Calendar interviews: A verbal report analysis
Tina J. Glasner, Wander van der Vaart · Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling · 2008
For this project, we conducted 37 cognitive interviews.In 29 of these interviews, calendar instruments were used, either as a recall aid in addition to a standardized retrospective questionnaire (n=14), or as a stand-alone data-collection device (n=15).During the interview, which covered a reference period of 20 years, respondents were asked to think aloud while answering retrospective questions and/or filling in the calendar.The interviews were transcribed and we subsequently coded verbal protocols for of 34 interviews in SequenceViewer 4.4 (Dijkstra, 2008).Our coding scheme covered cognitive processes involved in answering retrospective questions about event dates, such as sequencing, top-down retrieval, and the use of landmark event cues.The comparison revealed that even though event dating processes did not differ significantly between conditions, subjects used the calendar to check the quality of their responses and made corrections based on the visual feedback.