What is Cognitive Testing?
Cognitive testing involves the assessment of a person’s cognitive capabilities and is, therefore, a measure of their mental performance. A person’s cognitive abilities can be judged on the basis of their reasoning, perception, memory, problem-solving abilities, verbal abilities, as well as mathematical abilities.
For this reason, cognitive tests can be administered to humans in various ways, generally taking the form of psychometric tests, problem-solving tests, IQ tests, language tests, memory tests, and neurocognitive tests.
Within this article, we will explore how cognitive testing is used within research to create a more inclusive research design that helps reduce bias.
Relevance of Cognitive Pretesting in Research
Cognitive testing is sometimes used in research design to help reduce bias. This is generally done in the pretesting phase to test how different survey questions are understood and interpreted by different respondents. This is often referred to as cognitive pretesting.
It is a method of field research where researchers collect data on how subjects answer interview questions. It involves the evaluation of a test or survey before it is administered to the entire sample group using a survey software.
With cognitive testing, researchers can evaluate and determine whether the questions are interpreted by respondents in the way intended and whether the questions are able to effectively produce data that the researcher hopes to measure.
Data collected from cognitive testing is used to adjust questions that aren’t producing the right results before deploying the survey to the entire sample of respondents.
Cognitive pretesting helps obtain the following information:
- How do subjects interpret the questions?
- How do subjects construct their answers?
- Any difficulties faced by subjects while answering questions
- Any other relevant information revealing influences on subjects’ responses
Such information allows market researchers to create a more inclusive research design on their market research tool that will be interpreted and understood in the same way by different respondents.
How to Use Cognitive Testing to Reduce Bias in Research Design?
Bias in research design can be minimized through the use of an inclusive research design. An inclusive research design refers to a research design that caters to a wide range of people, regardless of age, ability, and circumstance. Surveys conducted using any online survey tool in an inclusive research design will include questions that can be understood and interpreted the same way by all respondents, regardless of their different experiences and backgrounds.
This, however, does not mean that respondents will respond to the questions in the same way, only that they will interpret the questions in the same way. The differences in respondent background and experience will certainly influence responses, and these differences in responses are one of the parameters we want to identify and measure.
An inclusive research design can help achieve the following:
- Reduce the instance of biased questions
- Avoid offensive questions
- Increase the fidelity of the data collected
- Increase response rates
It is important to note that simply altering demographic questions to cater to a more diverse audience is not equivalent to making a study inclusive. An inclusive research design must go beyond this to be understood and interpreted the same way by different respondents.
For example, while adding gender-fluid response options in a demographic question does make your study more inclusive, it is not enough on its own to create an inclusive research design. To be inclusive, the questions will also have to be written in a way that they are interpreted by all genders in the same way.
The Importance of Cognitive Testing in Research Design
Although cognitive testing is never going to make a survey ‘perfect’ and cannot account for every single perspective in the world, it does help us take a step toward making research more inclusive. It allows us to ensure that survey questions are interpreted in the same way, or as similar as possible, by all respondents.
This increases the validity of the research findings as a result. This brings more confidence in the survey results, like when conducting a customer experience survey using a customer experience tool, the findings could be used by an enterprise without hesitation.
Therefore, to increase the validity of survey responses, it is important to conduct cognitive pretesting prior to the launch of any study. The sample used in the pretests should be representative of the diversity of your target population, taking into account characteristics such as gender, age, race, etc.
The aim of conducting cognitive pretests is to identify any potential disparity between the way researchers intended the question to be perceived and the way subjects actually perceived it.
This also allows us to understand the reasoning behind different responses so that measures can be taken to ensure that questions are altered in a way that they are interpreted consistently across respondents with different backgrounds and experiences.
The use of cognitive testing to create a more inclusive research design can help reduce cognitive bias within studies, helping produce more reliable and consistent data in the process so that study findings are more representative of our target population.
