Qualitative Methods in Cognitive Psychology Thomas C. Ormerod & Linden J. Ball Department of Psychology Lancaster University, UK Chapter 31 , Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Psychology C. Willig & W. Stainton-Rogers (Eds). Sage Publications. Pp. 554-575. INTRODUCTION Writing a chapter on the application of qualitative methods to the study of cognitive phenomena immediately runs into a problem: Cognitive psychologists have from the outset held the view that one cannot trust self-reports of individuals as complete or accurate records of the cognitive processes that underlie their behaviours. Therefore, the story goes, one must adopt an independent, objective and measurable stance to investigating cognitive phenomena, which, by necessity, requires quantitative methods. In contrast, we suggest in this chapter that a full and useful understanding of cognitive phenomena and the behaviours that underlie them is achievable only through the rigorous application of a programme of mixed methods that capitalises upon the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The qualitative stance adopted by conversation analysts (e.g., Shotter, 1993), however, is problematic for cognition. To apply qualitative methods in cognitive psychology, you have to assume that language reflects thought—otherwise, there is no ‘cognition’ to study. The alternative, adopting a constructionist stance in which language becomes the object of study rather than the vehicle, is we argue, untenable for cognitive psychology. In this chapter, we assume that qualitative research into cognitive phenomena necessitates a reflective rather than constructive stance. First, we review the historical context, both past and recent, in which quantitative methods have come to dominate cognitive psychology. Second, we outline a set of reasons why we believe cognitive psychology must make recourse to qualitative methods. Third, we outline some of the key qualitative methods used to study cognitive phenomena, and exemplify them with studies from the cognitive domain, focusing especially on design cognition—an area we have been investigating over the past two decades. Fourth, we illustrate how qualitative and quantitative methods are best practiced together through a case study from our own recent research involving a study of expert reasoning in insurance-fraud investigation. HISTORICAL CONTEXT Cognitive psychology, as a distinct sub-discipline within psychology, is primarily concerned with advancing a theoretical understanding of the mental processes that underlie behaviour and action. As such, cognitive psychologists are concerned specifically (though not exclusively) with the nature of so-called ‘procedural knowledge’, that is, the knowledge that people posses about how to do things. The concept of procedural knowledge captures the idea that the mind applies rules, methods, tactics, strategies, heuristics and the like during cognitive processing, whether such processing is aimed at low-level perception, recognition and retrieval, or high-level thinking reasoning, problem-solving, judgement, decision making, and hypothesis testing. Procedural knowledge is viewed as being distinct from