What Do Our Respondents Think We're Asking? Using Cognitive Interviewing to Improve Medical Education Surveys

Consider the last time you answered a questionnaire. Did it contain questions that were vague or hard to understand? If yes, did you answer these questions anyway, unsure if your interpretation aligned with what the survey developer was thinking? By the time you finished the survey, you were probably annoyed by the unclear nature of the task you had just completed. If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone, as these types of communication failures are commonplace in questionnaires.1–3 And if you consider how often questionnaires are used in medical education for evaluation and educational research, it is clear that the problems described above have important implications for the field. Fortunately,…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Defense
• NI
  National Institutes of Health