This article examines an important and thorny problem in interview research: How to assess whether what people say motivated their actions actually did so? We ask three questions: What specific challenges are at play? How have researchers addressed them? And how should those strategies be evaluated? We argue that such research faces at least five challenges—deception, recall error, reasonableness bias, intentionality bias, and single-motive bias—that more than a dozen strategies have been deployed to address them; that the strategies have been external, internal, or interactional in nature; and that each class of strategies demands distinct evaluation criteria. Researchers will likely fail to uncover motivation if they ignore the possibility of each challenge, conflate one challenge with another, or deploy strategies unmatched to the challenge at hand. Our work helps systematize the evaluation of interview-based studies of motivated action and strengthen the scientific foundations of in-depth interview research.

本文探讨了访谈研究中一个重要而棘手的问题：如何评估人们所说的动机实际上是否是他们的动机？我们问三个问题：正在应对哪些具体挑战？研究人员如何解决这些问题？这些策略应该如何评估？我们认为，这样的研究至少面临五个挑战-欺骗，回忆错误，合理性偏见，意图偏见和单动机偏见-已经采用了十多种策略来解决这些问题；策略是外部的，内部的或交互的在自然界; 并且每种策略都需要不同的评估标准。如果研究人员忽略每个挑战的可能性，将一个挑战与另一个挑战混为一谈或部署与当前挑战不相匹配的策略，他们很可能无法发现动力。我们的工作有助于将基于访谈的动机行动研究的评估系统化，并加强深入访谈研究的科学基础。