Attachment 3b Protocol for one on one intv

Attachment 3b – Protocol for one-on-one cognitive interviews

Introduction (NCHS and our group):

Thank you for agreeing to meet here today. Karen has explained that we will be audio/video taping our interview and you gave permission to do that, correct? (If yes, then proceed). Before we start, I want to make sure that you understand who we are and why you’re here. I want to give you a little background on what we do at the National Center for Health Statistics. We are a federal agency, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (or CDC). One of the key missions of our agency is to monitor the health of people in the United States. And one of the main ways that we do that is through information that people provide on surveys and questionnaires.

Before we collect data with questionnaires, we want to make sure that the questions are clear and make sense to people. This is very important to help make sure that the data coming from responses are of high quality. Our specific work group is in charge of testing how well questions work. One way we do that is to try them out on people like yourselves.

Brief overview NHTSA survey:

The questions that we are working on today will be part of a survey for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The focus of the survey is on driving safety in relation to topics such as cell phone use, speeding, and alcohol.

Our goal: questionnaire evaluation

Our primary goal today is not to collect particular information about you—rather, we want to study how well this questionnaire works for people like you. For example, we want to make sure the questions are clear and make sense. I will read the questions to you and have you answer them exactly as you would if a survey taker were to ask you this information. In addition to you answering the survey questions, we are interested in your interpretations of various questions and what sorts of things you were thinking about while answering. Though we are asking you to answer the questions as carefully as possible, we are primarily interested in the ways that you arrived at those answers, and the problems you encountered. Therefore, any detailed help you can give us is important. Also, keep in mind that we did not write these questions, so don’t worry about hurting our feelings if you criticize them - our job is to find anything that might be wrong with them.

Do you have any questions before we begin?

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