摘要：Cognitive interviewing (CI) is established as a valid and reliable practical tool for forensic and health purposes, but its utility for the social sciences has yet to be fully exploited. This Update, aims to describe and appraise CI as a data-gathering tool and promote its use in the social sciences. We will illustrate the utility of CI by referring to our research on workplace violence (Waddington et al. 2006).
Why use CI?
One purpose of interviewing in social science is to obtain factual information of events that may be either hidden from view or occur so infrequently as to make direct observation non-viable—a problem particularly acute in criminology, but which occurs in other fields too. In this connection, interviewing techniques must enable valid and reliable recall of experience. CI claims to achieve this: providing descriptions of experience that are more complete and accurate than comparable methods, and less prone to confabulation.
