Investigating validity and effectiveness of cognitive interviewing as a pretesting method for non-English questionnaires: Findings from Korean cognitive interviews

This study aims to empirically investigate whether cognitive interviewing is effective as a pretesting method for detecting problems in translated survey questionnaires as in the English language source questionnaire. The validity of non-English cognitive interviews is of concern among researchers because the cognitive interviewing technique was developed based on the communicative norms of Western cultures where directness and openness in expressing one’s opinion is encouraged. However, different communicative norms are present in Asian languages and cultures. To date, little research has been conducted on this topic. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis, we compared survey question problems identified through the cognitive interviews conducted in English and in Korean and found that Korean cognitive interviewing was indeed effective for detecting problematic survey questions.