Cognitive Interviewing Methodology

FOREWORD

As an early practitioner of cognitive interviewing, I can remember presenting many talks on this new science throughout the 1990s. Occasionally, an audience member would ask a pointed question: Although its proponents spoke of the cognitive interview as an application of psychology, were we perhaps missing something by not taking into account other disciplines as well—like linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and so on? I thought this to be a good point, despite my strong focus on cognitive psychology as an anchoring point. In fact, over the ensuing years, there have been a number of contributions that have emphasized a wider disciplinary perspective—including the argument that responses to survey questions involve more than just the individual mind of the respondent, especially as they incorporate social and cultural phenomena in a social context.

In the current volume, Kristen Miller and her colleagues provide what I believe to be the clearest statement of this truth, and the furthest point in the evolution of cognitive interviewing as a mature expression of qualitative research that provides a rich multidisciplinary perspective. The arguments, illustrations, and examples within this book challenge practitioners of cognitive interviewing—and more broadly, anyone having an interest in the subtleties of questionnaire design—to think in new ways about how survey questions are developed by designers, answered by respondents, and consumed by data users. In particular, ...