Effective questionnaire design: How to use cognitive interviews to refine questionnaire items

BACKGROUND: Cognitive interviewing is a technique that can be used to improve and refine questionnaire items. We describe the basic methodology of cognitive interviewing and illustrate its utility through our experience using cognitive interviews to refine a questionnaire assessing parental understanding of concepts related to preterm birth. METHODS: Cognitive interviews were conducted using current best practices. Results were analyzed by the multidisciplinary research team and questionnaire items that were revealed to be problematic were revised. RESULTS: Revisions to the questionnaire items were made to improve clarity and to elicit responses that truly reflected the participants understanding of the concept. CONCLUSION: Cognitive interviewing is a useful methodology for improving validity of questionnaire items, we recommend researchers developing new questionnaire items design and complete cognitive interviews to improve their items and increase confidence in study conclusions.

Learning to design a mobile hunt on Actionbound: a complex task?

The research consisted in having an Actionbound mobile hunt for A1 learners of Dutch designed by a group of language Student Teachers (STs) within the framework of a second year course on foreign language teaching. The game was then implemented with two groups of fifth grade primary school pupils during their visit of the Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. These two steps allowed our multidisciplinary research team to analyse the use of the app from the perspective of not only the players but also the creators of the game. Research data was collected throughout the study via questionnaires, observations, and a focus group. A qualitative analysis of the STs’ data allowed us to establish their digital profiles, thereby situating each of them in the digital integration process. The results suggest that integrating technology and content when designing a pedagogical activity is a complex task. Support and guidance from teacher trainers could therefore be recommended in order to propose a pertinent integration of technologies in the language classroom.

Common Pitfalls in Analysis of Tissue Scores

Histopathology remains an important source of descriptive biological data in biomedical research. Recent petitions for enhanced reproducibility in scientific studies have elevated the role of tissue scoring (semiquantitative and quantitative) in research studies. Effective tissue scoring requires appropriate statistical analysis to help validate the group comparisons and give the pathologist confidence in interpreting the data. Each statistical test is typically founded on underlying assumptions regarding the data. If the underlying assumptions of a statistical test do not match the data, then these tests can lead to increased risk of erroneous interpretations of the data. The choice of appropriate statistical test is influenced by the study’s experimental design and resultant data (eg, paired vs unpaired, normality, number of groups, etc). Here, we identify 3 common pitfalls in the analysis of tissue scores: shopping for significance, overuse of paired t-tests, and misguided analysis of multiple groups. Finally, we encourage pathologists to use the full breadth of resources available to them, such as using statistical software, reading key publications about statistical approaches, and identifying a statistician to serve as a collaborator on the multidisciplinary research team. These collective resources can be helpful in choosing the appropriate statistical test for tissue-scoring data to provide the most valid interpretation for the pathologist.