Research Synthesis: The Practice of Cognitive Interviewing

Cognitive interviewing has emerged as one of the more prominent methods for identifying and correcting problems with survey questions. We define cognitive interviewing as the administration of draft survey questions while collecting additional verbal information about the survey responses, which is used to evaluate the quality of the response or to help determine whether the question is generating the information that its author intends. But beyond this general categorization, cognitive interviewing potentially includes a variety of activities that may be based on different assumptions about the type of data that are being collected and the role of the interviewer in that process. This synthesis reviews the…

• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• CF
  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• NC
  National Cancer Institute