Academic and Research Skills
Corrie McDaniel, DO (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor
Pediatrics
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, United States
Priti Bhansali, MD, MEd
Associate Professor of Pediatrics
Pediatrics
Children's National Health System
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Sonja Ziniel, PhD, MA (she/her/hers)
Assistant Research Professor; Senior Survey Methodologist
Pediatrics
University of Colorado School of Medicine - Department of Pediatrics
Aurora, Colorado, United States
Surveys are a common and seemingly easy way to collect data, yet often are fraught with bias and error, limiting the validity and generalizability of results. In this interactive and practical workshop, participants will learn how to test a survey using cognitive interviews, therefore assessing response-process validity. After introducing the importance for performing cognitive interviews before deploying a survey after having developed it, we will explain the “Think Aloud” and “Probing” techniques cognitive interviews use in more detail. Two workshop leaders will then perform a short cognitive interview as illustration before workshop participants will be assigned into groups of 3 in breakout rooms to conduct mock interviews using an example survey. Coming back as a large group, we will have group report-outs on the changes in their questions and the questionnaire design problems they think cognitive interviews can help detect and solve. Participants in this workshop will leave with a toolkit including additional literature on cognitive interviewing, as well as handouts on how to perform cognitive interviews and specific probing techniques.