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Questionnaire Design & Testing:
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Cognitive Testing
Although the use of good questionnaire design practice and review by experts can be very effective in producing good
quality questionnaires, it is extremely useful to also pretest these on individuals who are representative of the
population to be surveyed.
To this end, ARP uses cognitive testing procedures in which draft versions of questionnaires are tested in individual
interviewing sessions by specially trained interviewers. The objective of this interviewing is to probe respondents'
understanding of the questions, and their thinking as they provide answer. This allows interviewers to identify covert
problems not otherwise apparent in the design and review process. Cognitive interviewing techniques are used in
developing a wide variety of surveys by federal agencies and have come to be regarded as a standard in applying
"best practices" for questionnaire development.
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