IngentaConnect Sources of Error in Cognitive Interviews

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Published since 1937, Public Opinion Quarterly is among the most frequently cited journals of its kind. Such interdisciplinary leadership benefits academicians and all social science researchers by providing a trusted source for a wide range of high quality research. POQ selectively publishes important theoretical contributions to opinion and communication research, analyses of current public opinion, and investigations of methodological issues involved in survey validity-- including questionnaire construction, interviewing and interviewers, sampling strategy, and mode of administration. The theoretical and methodological advances detailed in pages of POQ ensure its importance as a research resource.

Abstract:

Cognitive interviewing is used to identify problems in questionnaires under development by asking a small number of pretest participants to verbally report their thinking while answering the draft questions. Just as responses in production interviews include measurement error, so the detection of problems in cognitive interviews can include error. In the current study, we examine error in the problem detection of both cognitive interviewers evaluating their own interviews and independent judges listening to the full set of interviews. The cognitive interviewers were instructed to probe for additional information in one of two ways: the Conditional Probe group was instructed to probe only about what respondents had explicitly reported; the Discretionary Probe group was instructed to probe whenever they felt it appropriate. Agreement about problems was surprisingly low overall, but differed by interviewing technique. The Conditional Probe interviewers uncovered fewer potential problems but with higher inter-judge reliability than did the Discretionary Probe interviewers. These differences in reliability were related to the type of probes. When interviewers in either group probed beyond the content of respondents verbal reports, they were prone to believe that the respondent had experienced a problem when the majority of judges did not believe this to be the case (false alarms). Despite generally poor performance at the level of individual verbal reports, judges reached relatively consistent conclusions across the interviews about which questions most needed repair. Some practical measures may improve the conclusions drawn from cognitive interviews but the quality of the findings is limited by the content of the verbal reports.