ABSTRACT
Professionals in domains such as health care are accountable for their decisions to their clients. That means that they may be expected to make their decisions after conscious deliberation, although with increasing experience they might increasingly use short-cuts in their decision processes, or intuition (e.g. Klein, 2003). In this chapter we describe two closely related and partly overlapping methods to measure consciously accessible components of decision making. Both methods directly ask decision makers what and how they think. The first method, think-aloud, is also used as part of the second method, Cognitive Structure Analysis (CSA; Leddo & Cohen, 1989). With the think-aloud method, participants are asked to verbalize all the thoughts they attend to. With CSA, you acquire knowledge about decision processes in two steps: First the knowledge structures or mental representations that are involved in performing a task in the domain of interest are uncovered through interviews, and then the contents of these structures are elicited with think-aloud problem solving. Hence, CSA might be used to uncover formerly hidden information structures that underlie intuition (Glöckner & Witteman, chapter 1, this volume).
