ABSTRACT
T his chapter examines a range of methods for eliciting and analyzing verbaldata with the purposes of describing decision processes and testing theor-ies about them. Generally speaking, processes are transformations of structures over time. A decision maker’s mental representation of a decision problem is such a structure, one that changes from the beginning of the decision process until the decision is made (Janis & Mann, 1977; Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1992; Russo, Medvec, & Meloy, 1996; Svenson, 1979), and continues to change after the decision (Festinger, 1957; Simon, Krawczyk, Bleicher, & Holyoak, 2008; Svenson, 1996, 2003). Decision makers’ mental representations of decision problems include both cognitive and affective or emotional structures.
