Introducing the Qualitative Pretest Interview (QPI) for questionnaire development

Abstract

<p>Cognitive interviews have become one of the most important pretest methods in the development and evaluation of questionnaires. Different techniques such as thinking aloud or various probing approaches analyse the comprehensibility and interpretation of questions, uncover difficulties of respondents in answering questionnaires as well as underlying causes. A desideratum of this approach is the methodological framing for which we make a proposal in this article. Direct research interaction in pretest situations can be regarded as an act of understanding others in the sense of qualitative-interpretive social research. On this basis, we discuss the advantage of methodically integrated communication strategies of two established qualitative survey methods - the problem-centred interview and the discursive interview - for the development of a distinct pretest interview approach. It adopts the techniques of the cognitive interview and expands them by the essentially social character of processes of clarifying comprehension. We introduce the term Qualitative Pretest Interview (QPI) in order to avoid the possible narrowing of the understanding of pretest procedures to the problem of ambiguous cognitions. Finally, we reflect on the potential of this approach for standardized survey research.</p>

The qualitative pretest interview for questionnaire development: outline of programme and practice

“…The QPI adopts from the PCI the idea of applying two sets of methodologically integrated communication strategies of general and specific exploration for collecting information and for directly negotiating implied meaning (Bethmann et al 2019;Buschle et al 2020;Witzel and Reiter 2012;Reiter and Witzel 2019). Together they constitute an integrated portfolio of techniques that allow the interviewer, depending on the course of the conversation, to change back and forth between active listening and active understanding.…”

“…The briefing should pay particular attention to the introduction of the communication strategy of thinking aloud that is also used in forms of cognitive interviewing (Bethmann et al 2019;Buschle et al 2020). 4 The QPI exploits the idea of thinking aloud that is used as a strategy of general exploration at the beginning of the review of each item.…”

“…The starting point of our contribution to advancing this very effort is the observation of a somewhat ambiguous relationship of the CI to qualitative-interpretive research (Bethmann et al 2019;Buschle et al 2020). Over the course of the past decades its authors and advocates moved the CI ever closer to the purposes and sphere of qualitative researchfrom the mere proposition that cognitive interviewing is "designed to help researchers understand how respondents interpret questions" (Beatty 1995(Beatty , p. 1052 to the more recent textbook about the analysis of CIs published in the Series in Understanding Qualitative Research of Oxford University Press (Willis 2015).…”

Development and psychometric validation of a novel scale for measuring ‘psychedelic preparedness’

“…In designing this scale, we aimed to ensure that initial item selection was guided by a wide set of expert opinions, and therefore devised a novel iterative strategy involving using both a Delphi methodology with learned experience experts and focus groups with lived experience experts. We additionally employed the recently developed 'pre-test interview' approach 21,22 , which aims to develop detailed (qualitative) insights into participants' (end users') experiences of survey questions, and to refine these in response to the insights gained during the interview.…”