Cognitive interviewing and questionnaire design a training manual

ii PREFACE This guide is based on the document “Cognitive Interviewing and Questionnaire Design: A Training Manual,” by Gordon Willis (Working Paper #7, National Center for Health Statistics, March ). In revised form, this document describes the cognitive interviewing techniques appropriate for questionnaire development and testing, and which are used by the staff of Research Triangle.  · REFERENCES 1. Jobe JB, Mingay DJ. Cognitive research improves questionnaires. Am J Public Health ; 2. Willis GB. Cognitive interviewing and questionnaire design: a training manual. National Center for Health Statistics. Working Paper Series, No. 7. March Journal of Nutrition Education Volume 31 Number 5 September October. Cognitive Interviewing: A Tool for Improving Questionnaire Design describes a means of systematically developing survey questions through investigations that intensively probe the thought processes of individuals who are presented with those inquiries. The work provides general guidance about questionnaire design, development, and pre-testing.

This tendency can be due to a combination of factors, such as the personality and education level of respondent, as well as conditions of the interview or design of a self-completed questionnaire. Respondents will often agree when the question is ambiguous or otherwise difficult to answer. Cognitive Interviewing: A Tool for Improving Questionnaire Design describes a means of systematically developing survey questions through investigations that intensively probe the thought processes of individuals who are presented with those inquiries. It includes specific guidelines on how to make questions clear, answerable, easy and unbiased. It also has guidelines on how to ask people to select from a list, rate things on a scale, and answer open-ended questions. It also has a review of how to properly pretest a questionnaire, commonly known as cognitive interviewing.

Goal: To use cognitive interviewing as a step in the questionnaire design process to Interviewers require more careful training and need to take care to. activity involved cognitive interviewing to pretest questionnaires. practices in training manuals (e.g., Willis ) or protocols for pretesting. Cognitive interviewing has emerged as one of the more prominent methods training process that emphasizes study of questionnaire design.