Protocol analysis is a psychological

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 research method that elicits verbal reports from research participants. Protocol analysis is used to study thinking in cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....

 (Crutcher, 1994), cognitive science

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

 (Simon & Kaplan, 1989), and behavior analysis (Austin & Delaney, 1998). It has found further application in the design of surveys and interviews (Sudman, Bradburn & Schwarz, 1996), usability testing

Usability testing

Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system...

 (Henderson, Smith, Podd, & Varela-Alvarez, 1995) and educational psychology

Educational psychology

Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. Educational psychology is concerned with how students learn and develop, often focusing...

 (Pressley & Afflerbach 1995; Renkl, 1997).

See also

• Think aloud protocol
  Think aloud protocol
  Think-aloud protocol is a method used to gather data in usability testing in product design and development, in psychology and a range of social sciences...
  
  
• Content analysis
  Content analysis
  Content analysis or textual analysis is a methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication. Earl Babbie defines it as "the study of recorded human communications, such as books, websites, paintings and laws."According to Dr...
  
  
• Partial concurrent thinking aloud
  Partial concurrent thinking aloud
  Partial Concurrent Thinking Aloud is a method used to gather data in usability testing with screen reader users...
  
  

External links

protocol analysis

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cprose/TagHelper.html: A tool for facilitating verbal protocol analysis in English, German, Spanish, or Chinese.