essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– COGNITIVE MAPPING–––––––––– 79organizations (McDonald, 2003). These could be fed back into the interview process toinform the next iteration of the research.Benefits of cognitive mapping for qualitative researchThis method has been designed because moving between raw data and the development of thethemes and categories that form the basis of the qualitative theory building process can beextremely difficult. The method suggested here is aimed at crossing the divide between data andtheory in a way that can be easily grasped and used by researchers with varying experience.The analysis process is similar to many of the familiar ‘categorization’ techniques used insocial science. It has one important advantage over ‘cut and paste’ techniques in that itsimultaneously allows the preservation of all the detail of the map as a context for any concept,and the ability to ‘collapse’ the map to show only the high level ‘routings’ through the map.Thus the researcher can easily switch back and forth between what is effectively arepresentation of a conversation and the surfacing theoretical structure. This is not only anenormous help in the sensemaking process, but also prevents the meaning of concepts driftingas they are forever tied into their original context.As well as being able simultaneously to represent conflicting viewpoints, the otherparticular strength of this technique is that it represents issues and statements that areinterlinked, interrelated, interdependent and even tangled. In contrast, the attempt toconstruct linear text forces the researcher to choose an organizing framework in advance ofwriting. This may be time (in the case of an interview transcript), or reasoning, or theme, forexample. Sometimes simply not having to choose a starting point and being able to ‘start inthe middle’ can make beginning the writing process more accessible. Liberation from more‘traditional’ forms of predetermined order also means that mapping has the advantage ofrecording nuance and complexity very quickly compared with prose.USING COGNITIVE MAPPING TO ELICIT MENTAL MODELS OF EMOTION AT WORK ––––––––––––––––In this second example, we describe a method used to explore mental models of emotionalexperience at work. Here, semi-structured methods based upon principles of cognitiverepresentation are used to elicit representations of participants’ mental models. Again this wasdone by making use of maps which show causal reasoning (see Figure 7.1), but this time wechose to develop a visual card sort technique (Daniels et al., 1995) with the explicit intentionof eliciting mental models. The visual card sort is a technique that enables rapid, open-endedelicitation of mental models.Developing the interview scheduleThe current research utilized a semi-structured interview, with theoretically derived promptsto maximize elicitation of concepts thought to be important to the current research. Theseprompts were developed from a review of the relevant literatures intended to capture the mainfeatures and processes by which emotions develop at work (Harris et al., 2002). Since wesought to examine differences in mental models of different emotional experiences at work,the interview schedule gave the participant enough discretion to explore their beliefs in an