Expert Mental Model Interview Protocols

This contains the Expert Mental Model Interview and Validation Feedback protocol documents for the research project “Factors Influencing Flood Risk Management Integration in U.S. Municipal Planning: An Expert Mental Model Approach.” Interviews followed a semistructured interview protocol, and the questions asked about the concepts and themes gathered during the document reviews, following a broad-to-narrow flow. Broad questions were structured to elicit people's mental models using a "what comes to mind when you think about approach," asking the interviewees to think freely about general topics rather than respond to narrowly focused questions. These questions also used general prompts such as "Can you tell me more about that?" or "Why is that important?" to probe interviewees, encouraging them to speak at length. The design of these questions allowed topics of interest to the interviewee to more readily emerge, using language and terminology that they would normally use. Narrower questions were asked as the interview progressed to ensure coverage of relevant factors and influences of concepts from the document review.
Interviews were all conducted virtually via Zoom videoconferencing and recorded with the interviewee's permission. Interviews were transcribed and used as the primary data in structured analyses. All interviews took approximately 60 minutes.