ABSTRACT
Students of individual decision-making have usually concerned themselves with problems of motivation and with the processes of human problem-solving and learning. This chapter presents a case study for health officer decision-making. The investigator became aware of the health officer's plans to undertake the project in its formative stage and obtained permission to study the decision processes in the project after the preliminary ideas had been developed. The general form of the interview was first to consider what had happened since the previous interview, following which the health officer was asked to project future plans. At the completion of the health officer's project, no feasible problem had been defined. The decision to defer action was really a negative decision, because it probably served as a strategy for dealing with the uncertainties of the environment as well as with the conflict in values that had been made explicit during the learning process.
