Tested Questions: Cognitive Interviewing for Digital Access

According to PLOS One (Taluja et al., published July 28, 2026), cognitive interviewing exposed widespread comprehension problems in questions about mobile phone access and digital use and required revisions for almost all tested items. The PLOS One paper is available at PLOS One.

• 101 cognitive interviews were conducted between 1 April 2023 and 27 April 2023, testing a library of 118 draft questions, according to PLOS One (Taluja et al., 2026).
• The sample included 44 men and 57 women, average age 30 years, and interviews averaged 52 minutes per session, according to PLOS One (Taluja et al., 2026).
• The PLOS One team identified seven recurring problem types: inappropriate terminology, overly complex wording, low resonance of digital concepts, confusion about permission/supervision, problematic question structure, self-practice bias, and unclear time frames (Taluja et al., 2026).
• Smartphone ownership in the study was 84% for men and 56% for women, and only 20% of men and 18% of women had nine or more years of education, as reported in PLOS One (Taluja et al., 2026).

The PLOS One research team conducted 101 cognitive interviews in rural Uttar Pradesh between 1 April 2023 and 27 April 2023 to evaluate 118 draft survey questions about phone ownership, use, norms, and harms (Taluja et al., 2026).

The PLOS One team purposively sampled adults with lower formal education to stress-test comprehension, interviewed 44 men and 57 women, recorded 70 substantive interviews for transcription, and iterated questions across three rounds of testing (Taluja et al., 2026).

Key measurement failures the PLOS One team documented included formal Hindi terms that respondents did not recognize, multipart questions that overwhelmed short-term memory, and digital concepts such as "privacy policy" and "hack" that lacked local resonance (Taluja et al., 2026).

Direct respondent quotations in PLOS One illustrate the problem: a respondent (F27) said, "Please speak in Hindi. What does the question mean? ", and another (F06) explained, "Kaam-dhandha means cooking food, washing utensils. All the household chores."

Cognitive interviewing is essential for valid digital access surveys because instrument translations and technical terms often do not map to everyday language, as shown in PLOS One (Taluja et al., 2026).

The PLOS One team found that shorter items, colloquial translations, and examples of local apps (for example WhatsApp and YouTube) improved comprehension of abstract digital concepts (Taluja et al., 2026).

Survey teams should expect to iterate tools in staged rounds: the PLOS One researchers revised items across three rounds of testing, reducing question failures as testing progressed (Taluja et al., 2026).

When measuring norms and attitudes, the PLOS One study recommends simpler response formats (binary or three-point scales) because many respondents struggled with 4–5 point Likert scales and showed "self-practice bias" when asked about others' views (Taluja et al., 2026).

Cognitive interviewing for digital access, as documented in PLOS One (Taluja et al., published July 28, 2026), uncovered systematic comprehension problems that would have compromised a large-scale survey if left unaddressed.

Survey teams should embed iterative cognitive testing, use local examples for abstract digital terms, simplify response formats, and document changes across rounds as the PLOS One team did with 118 questions over three rounds in April 2023 (Taluja et al., 2026).

If you run cognitive interviews and need to scale transcription, translation, thematic coding, and cross-segment synthesis, Evidano’s AI-enabled platform can shorten the path from raw interviews to a revised question library; see Evidano features for details.

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