editorial Announcing a Special Issue on the Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology

Applied Cognitive Psychology seeks to publish the best papers, in any area of specializa-tion, that combine cognitive theory and application. One area, the cognitive aspects of survey methodology (CASM) movement, started 20 years ago (Jabine, Straf, Tanur, & Tourangeau, 1984) as an “attempt to build a bridge between deep interdisciplinary chasms ” (Tanur, 1992, p. ix), has sought to strengthen collaborations between survey methodologists and cognitive psychologists for the benefit of both fields. To survey meth-odologists, theories and observations of cognitive psychology can be applied in reducing “response errors. ” To applied cognitive psychologists, applying cognitive, communica-tive, and memory principles to problems in survey methodology has the potential to ad-vance cognitive theory. But during the past 20 years, the discipline of applied cognitive psychology simply has not exerted an appropriate level of influence, nor reaped a sustained level of rewards, in its association with the CASM movement. As Wright and Loftus (1998) have pointed out, most of the CASM effort is devoted, by design, to the benefit of survey methodology