Cognitive testing is especially suited to the early development of survey questions.
Methods varied by grantee. Other testing used the retrospective think-aloud method, in which respondents complete the interview and then are debriefed and asked to describe how they arrived at their answers. The most frequently used probes asked respondents to explain their understanding of particular questions, or to explain how they arrived at an answer. The interviews tested adult common core items, as well as items specifically targeted to address concerns of particular salience to the chronically ill, Medicaid beneficiaries, and consumers of pediatric care. All items were tested in English, and a subset of core questions and Medicaid-targeted items were also tested in Spanish.