Abstract

This chapter links the discovery process of creating a descriptive model with a verification process. Descriptive “models” distilled from qualitative interviews describe cognitive representations of explanations, processes, expectations, beliefs, and appropriate responses. These representations are mental models or schemas for thinking about objects and relations between objects. When shared across people, they are cultural models. An issue of validity arises when we try to generalize to larger groups. This chapter describes three approaches for confirming descriptive models using cultural consensus theory. When combined with a mixed-methods approach, cultural consensus offers a way to evaluate the amount of agreement among respondents and identify salient, shared themes. A first approach validates model content by comparing themes in descriptive qualitative results with those identified with cultural consensus. A second approach validates content by explicitly asking about model assumptions, processes, and causal relations, and then uses cultural consensus to verify those relationships. Agreement between models obtained descriptively and with cultural consensus offers evidence of convergent validity. A third approach goes a step further with construct validation and uses individual behavioral consonance with the cultural consensus model to make predictions about other aspects of everyday life.