ABSTRACT
Otherwise rigorous research programs, pursuing both basic and applied psychological questions, can misinform as much as inform when researchers impose their own (“top-down”) assumptions about the nature of the psychological constructs on research participants, through their use of rigid, closed-ended measurement strategies. We describe a broad class of more flexible (and “bottom-up”) elicitation research methods, where understandings of psychological constructs arise through structured and semi-structured interactions with respondents, such that research participants might help researchers build better measures and pursue more meaningful research. Our treatment focuses on four broad categories of research, highlighting the role that elicitation methods might serve in each: (a) Descriptive Research, where the goal is to better understand the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of a population of interest, (b) Early Stage Research, where the goal is to position descriptive understandings for more programmatic research to follow, (c) Theory Development, where the goal is to pursue ecologically valid tests of theory, and (d) Intervention Research, where elicitation methods assist in the creation of participant-informed, ecologically valid interventions to produce meaningful changes in behavior. Our treatment of ecological research methods revolves around examples of published research, where this method has produced novel and at times counterintuitive understandings of behavior and best strategies to promote change.
