Interview analysis with cognitive maps

Qualitative text analysis typically examines interviews by focusing on text that represents certain ideas, which are then categorized into concepts (Strauss and Corbin 1990), or themes (Braun and Clarke 2006). This approach to text analysis captures the ideas expressed by an interview, and informs numerous theories developed from qualitative research. However, what is missing from this approach is a focus on text that represents connections between ideas (rather than the idea itself), showing how an interviewee considers ideas to be related to each other. These connections are frequently expressed by natural language in the form of linguistic connectors (e.g. because, therefore, if-then, etc.). Including these linguistic connectors into interview analysis offers new opportunities to trace the fine-grained ways in which interviewees reason about the world and their behavior in it, which adds important insight into the micro-level foundations of political behavior. Importantly, this insight can diverge from the main assumptions underlying existing theories obtained from research applying both qualitative and quantitative methods. This paper introduces cognitive mapping to the qualitative study of interview transcripts. Cognitive mapping is a methodology developed by Axelrod (1976) for the analysis of policy documents. Applying the method to interviews advances existing methods for interview analysis by identifying both ideas and connections between ideas. Cognitive maps consist of three main components: beliefs; connections between beliefs, called inferences; and decisions to engage in a certain behavior. Based on this structure, cognitive maps can systematically identify the reasoning processes underlying certain behaviors, modeled as chains of interconnected beliefs (from belief, to belief, to belief, …., to decision). This paper explains how to systematically construct cognitive maps from interview transcripts, focusing separately on beliefs, inferences, and decisions. Each step in the process is outlined using detailed descriptions of specific examples from a unique sample of interviews, compiled over the last decade, on resistance in the Middle East. The paper analyzes the same interview excerpts through both thematic analysis and cognitive mapping. This shows the added value of cognitive mapping, illustrating how it can serve to identify new information on reasoning processes contained by interviews. Regarding resistance in the Middle East, the findings question the often-assumed connection between religion and terrorism (e.g. Juergensmeyer 2017) by showing that decisions to pick up arms were primarily connected to beliefs about state violence rather than Islam. They also offer new insight into the role of key motivators, including emotions, mental illness, and social dynamics, in decision-making on resistance. Overall, the paper demonstrates how cognitive mapping offers a promising and fruitful new avenue for the qualitative analysis of interviews. References: Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. Basics of qualitative research. Sage publications, 1990. Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. "Using thematic analysis in psychology." Qualitative research in psychology 3.2 (2006): 77-101. Axelrod, Robert. Structure of decision. The cognitive maps of political elites. Princeton University Press, 1976. Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the mind of God: The global rise of religious violence. Vol. 13. Univ of California Press, 2017.