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Gordon B. Willis - Cognitive Interviewing: A Tool for Improving Questionnaire Design

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Cognitive Interviewing: A Tool for Improving Questionnaire Design
Author:
Gordon B Willis
Publisher:
SAGE Publications
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Books / Politics
Year:
2004
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As both an academic instructor in questionnaire design and a research design methodologist for the federal government, I feel this book is very timely, useful for students and practitioners, and unique in its use of real world practical examples that most everyone can relate.
Terry Richardson, General Accounting Office

The combination of theory and practical application will make this a useful book for students as well as professionals who want to learn how to incorporate cognitive interviewing into the questionnaire design process.
Rachel Caspar, RTI International

The design and evaluation of questionnairesand of other written and oral materialsis a challenging endeavor, fraught with potential pitfalls. 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 sequence, with an emphasis on the cognitive interview. In particular, the book gives detailed instructions about the use of verbal probing techniques, and how one can elicit additional information from subjects about their thinking and about the manner in which they react to tested questions. These tools help researchers discover how well their questions are working, where they are failing, and determine what they can do to rectify the wide variety of problems that may surface while working with questionnaires.

Cognitive Interviewing is ideally suited as a course text for advanced undergraduate and graduate research courses across the social sciences. Professional researchers and faculty in the social sciences, as well as practice fields such as medicine, business, and education, will also find this an invaluable reference for survey research. There is no other book on the market that covers cognitive interviewing as applied to questionnaire design.

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C OGNITIVE I NTERVIEWING

A Toll for Improving Questionnaire Design

Gordon B. Willis

Copyright 2005 by Sage Publications Inc All rights reserved No part of this - photo 1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was written in a personal capacity and does not represent the opinions of the NIH, DHHS, or the United States government.

For information:

	Sage Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail:
Sage Publications Ltd. 1 Olivers Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom
Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 India

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Willis, Gordon B. (Gordon Bruce)
Cognitive interviewing: a tool for improving questionnaire design / by Gordon B. Willis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7619-2803-0 (cloth) ISBN 0-7619-2804-9 (pbk.)
1. Interviewing. 2. Cognition. 3. QuestionnairesMethodology. 4. Social surveysMethodology. 5. Social sciencesResearchMethodology. 6. PsychologyResearchMethodology. I. Title: Improving questionnaire design. II. Title.
H61.28.W55 2005
001.433dc22

2004013649

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

04 05 06 07 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acquisitions Editor:	Lisa Cuevas Shaw
Editorial Assistant:	Margo Beth Crouppen
Production Editor:	Julia Parnell
Copy Editor:	Diana Breti
Typesetter:	C&M Digitals (P) Ltd.
Indexer:	Jeanne Busemeyer
Cover Designer:	Glenn Vogel

Contents

Preface

T his book centers on a techniquethe cognitive interviewthat has become increasingly important in the development and testing of survey questionnaires. During the 1990s I wrote several versions of a brief training manual describing how to do cognitive interviewing, due to the absence of literature describing the process in detail. However, it became clear that more was needed; in particular, readers wanted considerably more detail concerning the intricacies of verbal probing techniques. Just as significantly, it was important to be able to place the conduct of cognitive interviewing in the larger context of questionnaire design as it is typically carried out.

Concerning the conduct of cognitive interviewing, I realized from the beginning of this endeavor that the activity is practiced in a number of ways, and that there is no single set of best practices. This is partly due to the flexible nature of the enterprise, which gives rise to a range of approaches and applications. However, I believe that much of the variation between the practices currently labeled as cognitive interviewing exists simply because there has been little in the way of detailed description incorporating a common vocabulary and set of working principles. This book is an attempt to address this shortcoming. However, I make no attempt to impose a strict set of commandments on anyone who conducts cognitive interviews. Although I present personal (and perhaps idiosyncratic) viewpoints on how best to conduct cognitive interviewing, I do endeavor to distinguish between my own opinions and conclusions that are based on empirical findings. Unfortunately, it remains a fact that there is very little hard evidence concerning the best ways to conduct the interview, so much of my attention is given to documenting the range of approaches, with an emphasis on the approaches that I have personally found to be of most use. Readers should therefore recognize that although my opinions are presumably informed ones, as they are based on fifteen years of experience and hundreds of interviews, they are not the only ones that exist, and reasonable people may disagree. Overall, I have attempted to strike a middle ground between a radically individualistic view and that representing the safe, mutually agreed-upon status quo.

A word on scope: although this volume is explicitly about cognitive interviewing and the assorted details involved in carrying out this activity, I have also addressed several broader issues in order to provide effective context. I had no wish to duplicate other excellent volumes on either questionnaire design (e.g., Fowler, 1995) or the cognitive aspects of survey methods (e.g., Tourangeau, Rips, & Rasinski, 2000; Schwarz & Sudman, 1996). However, readers of my training manuals consistently asked for more information, in particular, (a) How do I get started writing survey questions before testing them? (b) What are the features of a good question in the first place? (c) At what point should I test questions? (d) How do I devise cognitive probes to test questions? and (e) How does cognitive testing compare with other pretesting methods?

Because these are all good questions, I have attempted to provide answers. Without attempting to write a full volume on either questionnaire design or pretesting methods, I consider issues like principles of questionnaire design and how they must be kept in mind when conducting cognitive interviewing. Further, I describe other commonly used methods, including focus groups and behavior coding, in enough detail that the reader can appreciate how they are both similar to and different from cognitive interviewing. I stop well short of proposing a unified field theory of pretesting. However, a major theme is that cognitive interviewing does not stand in isolation from the entire context of questionnaire (and survey) development and must be presented as part of a larger picture.

Because the scope of cognitive interviewing has widened, I have also attempted to specify the ways in which it can be used in areas such as testing computerized questionnaires (CATI, CAPI and Web), and for studies that have a cross-cultural emphasis. I hope I have hit the right balance between a focused, microscopic view and a broad, telescopic one. A further balancing act that I found challenging was to resolve the tension between writing a how to instructional manual and a more scholarly review of the literature on this topic. I have attempted to do a significant amount of both.

Regarding terminology, ironically, for a field that dwells excessively on wording issues, the survey methods arena has produced a bewildering I define explicitly what we are includingand excludingwhen we refer to the cognitive interview. More specifically, it occurred to me that as the focus of the book is methodology, the terminology should be consistent with respect to method, technique, and procedure. It is not especially helpful to use these terms interchangeably, even though a dictionary search reveals that the definition of each tends to involve the others. Rather, I define them as follows:

I consider method to be the most general level; in the context of questionnaire pretesting, this involves a classification of pretest method in the form of cognitive interviewing, behavior coding, or some other gross level of distinction.

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