Cognitive Interviews: Designing Survey Questions for Adolescents

The Flourishing Children Project responds to a call for rigorous indicators of positive development in adolescents by creating scales for 19 constructs of positive development in the categories of flourishing in school and work, personal flourishing, flourishing in relationships, relationship skills, helping others to flourish, and environmental stewardship. Each scale can be used alone or in combination to fill gaps in available measures of important constructs of adolescent flourishing. This chapter describes how items for the scales were developed, revised, and tested in cognitive interviews to ensure that items in the scales assessed each construct as it was conceptually defined and that items could be answered by respondents. To test the validity of items and identify problems with item wording, three rounds of cognitive interviews with adolescents ages 12–17 years and parents were conducted in 15 cities across the United States. A variety of techniques were used in the interviews, including concurrent and retrospective “think alouds,” follow-up probes, paraphrasing, and the use of semistructured, open-ended items. Sixty-eight cognitive interviews were conducted with adolescents and 23 parallel interviews were completed with parents. The adolescent sample was spread across racial/ethnic, age (12–13 years old and 14–17 years old), and income groups.