A cognitive map displays a person’s representation of concepts or processes about a particular domain, showing the relationships, flows, and dynamics among them. The visual map helps answer the question “What may be going through a person’s mind as he or she experiences a particular series of actions and/or reflects on an experience?” Descriptive text accompanies the map for explanation (see Display 7.7).
Display 7.7
A Cognitive Map of One Person’s Housecleaning Process
Applications
There are times when the visual representation of concepts and processes is more effective than narrative alone. If we put stock in the classic folk saying “A picture is worth a thousand words,” then cognitive maps are one way of efficiently and elegantly portraying what may be going through people’s minds as they reflect on or enact an experience.
Many of our examples so far have been complex, multilevel cases. But cases are often focused at the individual level. We need displays that show us the complexity of the person. People’s minds—
and our theories about them—are not always organized hierarchically as in folk taxonomies. They can be represented fruitfully in nonhierarchical network form: a collection of nodes attached by links, and/or bins extended with arrows.
Some research studies examine the mundane in humans’ lives to understand concepts such as roles, relationships, rules, routines, and rituals—the habits of daily existence (Duhigg, 2012). The mundane example illustrated here is housecleaning, which we will soon learn is not as simple or as
“mindless” as it may seem to be. Some people put a great deal of thought into it to develop time-efficient patterns of action across time.
An older and slightly arthritic married woman is interviewed at her home about her housecleaning routines. She shows the interviewer where all her cleaning supplies (broom, dust mop, glass cleaner, furniture polish, etc.) are kept; she then takes the interviewer through each room of her four-bedroom home, pointing out specific tasks and challenges during her every-other-week “cleaning days”:
Woman: I clean my house over two days, not because it takes that long to do it, but at my age it’s easier to space it out over two half-days. I do all the tiled rooms on the first day, then the carpeted and laminate floor
rooms on the second day. . . .
Interviewer: Why do you clean tile rooms the first day?
Woman: Because they’re the hardest and I want to get them out of the way first.
And since they all use sort of the same cleaning supplies, I just move them from one room to another. . . . I usually start out with the
bathrooms.
Interviewer: Which one gets done first?
Woman: Sometimes it doesn’t matter. I might clean the smaller one first to
“warm up” for housecleaning, then tackle the master bath[room], which takes about three times as long because I have to clean the shower stall and there’s more mirrors and stuff in there. . . . Then I do the laundry room, and you can see I have to deal with cat litter in here. And it takes awhile to move everything around because there’s so little space. It might look like a small room but it actually takes about 20, 25 minutes for me to clean. Then I go to the foyer, and that’s a snap—5 to 10 minutes at most. Then I go to the breakfast nook and kitchen, and you know how long that takes.
Interviewer: Well, I have a much smaller kitchen. (laughs) How long does it take for you?
Woman: Top to bottom for the kitchen, about an hour? I always start at this end (pointing to the coffeemaker on the counter) then work my way around to the sink last. Well, the floor is last, cleaning that with the steamer. And when the floor’s dry, I put the throw rugs back down on it.
The interview continues, covering in detail the woman’s second-day cleaning routines.
Throughout, specific questions were asked by the interviewer to ascertain what, where, how, and
why things are done in certain ways. Time was also discussed and demarcated into when and for how long, since the interviewee herself assigns ranges of minutes it takes to clean each room in her home. The basic goal of the interview is to collect sufficient information to construct a cognitive map of a person’s process. In other words, we need to gather enough data to answer the question “What may be going through a person’s mind as he or she experiences a particular series of actions and/or reflects on an experience?” This includes not just facts but reasoning, memories, and emotions as well.
The initial interview is transcribed and reviewed. Follow-up questions, if needed, are composed for a second interview. The transcripts then become the verbal directions for designing the visual map.
Analysis
Drawing and constructing a cognitive map is the analysis, for you are trying to visually represent a real-time process. Tools available to you are paper and pencil, “sticky notes” and a wall board, or graphics/modeling software such as those found in most CAQDAS programs. Whatever method works best for you is fine, so long as you realize that you will be going through several mapping drafts before you feel you’ve captured the process on paper or on a monitor screen. You’ll also discover that alternately drawing a map and writing the accompanying narrative help inform each other. After a draft of a cognitive map, the narrative gets written, which then stimulates a redrafting of the map and clarification of the narrative’s details, and so on.
Display 7.7 shows the resulting cognitive map of this case study’s housecleaning process, extracted from interview data and visually represented through captions, text, bins, nodes, lines, and arrows. The visual display also needs an accompanying narrative to explain the nuances of her thinking (excerpts):
Housecleaning is dreaded but nevertheless “prepared for” a day ahead of time. To the mildly arthritic Janice, the every-other-week task is a “necessary evil.” When time permits, any laundering of towels, throw rugs, and bed sheets is done on a Wednesday so that Janice doesn’t have to “hassle” with it as she’s cleaning house on Thursday and Friday. This is just one way of making a burdensome task less strenuous.
Time and energy are two important concepts she thinks about when housecleaning. The routine is highly organized from over two decades of living in this home. On Day 1 of formal housecleaning, Janice’s strategy is to tackle the “hard” rooms first to “get them out of the way.” This strategy enables her to continue for approximately three hours (which includes numerous short breaks, due to her arthritis) to complete her scheduled tasks with sufficient energy: “If I save the hardest rooms for last, they’d probably never get done, or get done only part way. Bathrooms are the worst; I hate cleaning them, so that’s why I do them first—get them out of the way.”
Day 1’s six tile floored rooms each have a preparation ritual: “Before I start each room, I bring into it everything I’m going to need for cleaning it: the Windex, paper towels, steamer, duster, trash bag. . . . That way, I don’t have to waste time going back and forth to get this and that—it’s all in the room, ready to go.” Each room cleaning routine also follows two spatial patterns: “Clean from top to bottom—wall stuff first, then to counters, then the floor,” concurrent with analog clock-like movement: “Start at one end of the room and work my way around it.”
The process described above is the researcher’s interpretation of what’s going through a person’s mind. But cognitive maps can also be collaboratively constructed between the researcher and participant. The procedure engages the respondent and the researcher in joint work, simultaneously building the display and entering data.
After an initial interview about the experience or process, the researcher transcribes the exchange and extracts key terms, concepts, in vivo codes, and so on. Each one gets written on its own “sticky note,” and a follow-up mapping interview is scheduled with the participant.
At the audio-recorded mapping interview, the participant is given the sticky notes and is asked to arrange them on a large poster-size sheet of paper on a wall “in a way that shows how you think about the words.” When this task is complete, the researcher asks, “Why are they arranged this way?” The researcher draws lines around concepts that the person says belong together, and evokes a name for the group, which also is written on the display. The question “What relationship is there between _____ and _____?” leads to the person’s naming of links between concepts and/or concept groups, and those too are written on the display.
During preliminary analysis, the researcher listens to the recording of the mapping discussion, clarifies any errors, and writes a descriptive text that walks through the complete map. The revised map and narrative are fed back to the respondent to ensure that it is an accurate representation of the concept or process.
This version of cognitive mapping makes for maximum idiosyncrasy—and complexity—in the results. A simpler version (Morine-Dershimer, 1991) asks the respondent to generate a list of concepts related to a major topic. The major topic is placed in the center, and then other concepts are placed around it, with unnamed links radiating out to them, and from them, to other concepts in turn.
Cognitive maps have a way of looking more organized, socially desirable, and systematic than they probably are in the person’s mind. Allow for those biases when making analyses and interpretations. Also acknowledge that one person’s cognitive map does not necessarily represent others’ ways of thinking and acting in comparable situations. (For example, when the husband of this case study cleans the house, he chooses to accomplish the task in 1 day instead of 2. He begins at one end of the house and works his way from one room to the adjacent room, regardless of flooring surface, until he reaches the other end of the house.)
Notes
Cognitive maps also can be drawn from preestablished narratives such as interview transcripts, fiction, or other longer documents. Here, the analyst is interrogating the text rather than the person.
You can even use cognitive mapping techniques to clarify your own ideas or analytic processes about the meaning of a particular set of data.
For a quirky and humorous fictional media representation of participant observation and cognitive mapping, see the outstanding Norwegian/Swedish film Kitchen Stories.
Closure and Transition
These methods for describing social settings and action are documentary processes. They condense a vast array of data into more coherent forms for answering one of the inquiry’s most basic questions: “What is happening here?” Sometimes a research study’s goals are focused solely on description, but other goals may include deeper explorations into the “whys” of what humans do.
Exploring and describing are two foundation methods for analyzing qualitative data. In Chapter 8, we will arrange data into more systematic and ordered formats for constructing even more patterns across time, processes, and cases.