Cognitive Interviewing A How To Guide

Short Description
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 1994). 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 Institute (Laboratory for Survey Methods and Measurement, Research Triangle Park, NC; Cognitive Research Laboratory, Rockville, MD). Although there are several cognitive laboratories currently in operation that may utilize various procedures, the specific methods described were adopted from those used at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where the author previously worked as a senior staff member in the Questionnaire Design Research Laboratory.

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Content
1. BACKGROUND: COGNITIVE INTERVIEWING TECHNIQUES
The cognitive interviewing approach to evaluating sources of response error in survey questionnaires was developed during the 1980’s through an interdisciplinary effort by survey methodologists and psychologists. Some general features of this approach are as follows:
a) In the form presented here, it focuses mainly on the questionnaire, rather than on the entire survey administration process (the focus is on survey questions, as opposed to administration procedures such as Computer Administered Personal Interviewing).
b) It explicitly focuses on the cognitive processes that respondents use to answer survey questions; therefore, covert processes that are normally hidden, as well as overt, observable ones, are studied.
c) For the conduct of the cognitive interview, volunteer subjects are recruited, and are interviewed either in a laboratory environment, or in some other private location (in this application, the term “subject”’ refers to an individual who is tested through a cognitive interviewing procedure, and “respondent“ defines someone who is interviewed in a fielded survey).
d) The recruitment of subjects targets persons with specific characteristics of interest (for example, the elderly, those who have used illicit drugs in the past 12 months, teenagers who have used chewing tobacco, etc.).
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