The Role Of Respondent Debriefing Questions In Questionnaire Development

Abstract

this paper, we argue that debriefing questions can be used as a cognitive tool to assess the quality of the interview, and that because they can be administered to a large and representative sample, they are an important "back-end" supplement to the one-on-one interviews used in the early phases of questionnaire development (DeMaio and Rothgeb, 1993). This paper 1) reviews the literature to see how respondent debriefing questions have been used in other surveys; 2) presents results of a respondent debriefing conducted in conjunction with the pretest of the Food Security Supplement to the Current Population Survey, and 3) recommends that such debriefings be made a routine part of questionnaire development and evaluation, along with such techniques as behavior coding.