Research synthesis: The practice of cross-cultural cognitive interviewing

Abstract

Cross-cultural cognitive interviewing (CCCI) has increasingly been practiced across a range of cultures, languages, and countries, in an effort to establish cross-cultural equivalence of survey questions and other materials, to detect sources of difficulties in answering survey questions for particular subgroups, and to detect problems related to translation from source to target languages. Although descriptions of such studies have proliferated in both the published and unpublished literatures, there has been little effort to reconcile discrepant views, approaches, and findings. The current synthesis reviews 32 CCCI studies located in peer-reviewed journals and books, along with key unpublished sources, to characterize these investigations in terms of their purpose, procedures, and findings. Based on a number of trends in this emergent field, conclusions are made concerning appropriate methods for cognitive testing of cross-cultural instruments, and recommendations are made for future practices that will serve to advance the CCCI field.