Cognitive interviewing for digital access: lessons from India

According to the PLOS One study (Taluja et al., 2026), 101 cognitive interviews conducted between 01/04/2023 and 27/04/2023 tested 118 draft questions and found that almost every question required revision to be comprehensible to rural Hindi speakers.

• 101 cognitive interviews were conducted between 01/04/2023 and 27/04/2023 to test 118 draft questions, according to PLOS One (published July 28, 2026).
• The PLOS One study (published July 28, 2026) reports respondent counts of n = 44 men and n = 57 women, with 84% of male respondents and 56% of female respondents owning smartphones.
• The PLOS One study (published July 28, 2026) identified seven recurring question problems, including inappropriate terminology, overly complex wording, and low resonance of digital concepts.
• Direct respondent feedback captured key misunderstandings, for example one respondent said, "Please speak in Hindi. What does the question mean? " (Respondent F27) as reported in PLOS One (July 28, 2026).
• PLOS One (July 28, 2026) documents that interviews averaged 52 minutes and that iterative revision across three rounds improved comprehension before finalizing the instrument.

The PLOS One study tested 118 draft survey questions using formal cognitive interviewing with 101 respondents in rural Uttar Pradesh between 01/04/2023 and 27/04/2023.

According to PLOS One (Taluja et al., 2026), interviewers administered each quantitative item exactly as written, then used adaptive qualitative probes to ask respondents why they answered as they did and what key terms meant to them.

The PLOS One study (published July 28, 2026) sampled adults with lower-than-average formal education, deliberately oversampled women until comprehension was established, and translated questions into multiple Hindi variants during a week-long translation workshop.

The PLOS One analysis (July 28, 2026) synthesized daily team debriefs and coded 70 fully transcribed interviews in Dedoose, while 31 interviews were analyzed from debrief notes, producing seven categories of question problems.

The PLOS One findings (July 28, 2026) include verbatim respondent illustrations such as "Kaam-dhandha means cooking food, washing utensils" (Respondent F06) to show how literal translations shifted intended constructs.

Survey designers should treat cognitive interviewing as essential when adapting digital access questions for rural or low-literacy populations, because the PLOS One study (July 28, 2026) found that many technically correct translations still failed to convey intended meaning.

According to PLOS One (Taluja et al., 2026), researchers should prefer colloquial translations over formal equivalents, for example replacing uncommon Hindi terms with everyday words: the study reports multiple cases where formal translations triggered respondent confusion.

The PLOS One study (July 28, 2026) recommends breaking multi-clause questions into shorter items, avoiding five-clause stems that respondents could not retain, and preferring binary or three-point response formats where four- or five-point Likert scales caused misunderstanding.

The PLOS One findings (July 28, 2026) show that measuring permission and supervision must be anchored to ownership status and shared-device practices, because respondents conflated asking permission with assistance or notification in shared-phone contexts.

The PLOS One study (July 28, 2026) advises using event-anchored recall (for example, "yesterday" or "in the last 7 days") rather than abstract recall intervals like "in the past week, " because respondents better understood explicit day counts.

The PLOS One study (Taluja et al., 2026) demonstrates that cognitive interviewing revealed widespread comprehension problems in a 118-question draft instrument and that iterative testing across 101 interviews between 01/04/2023 and 27/04/2023 produced actionable revisions.

Survey teams designing digital access measures should prioritize colloquial translation, short questions, event-anchored recall, and simplified response options, as recommended by PLOS One (July 28, 2026).

To speed iterative testing, analysts can pair cognitive interviewing with AI-enabled tools: Evidano speeds transcription, translation management, thematic coding, and cross-segment comparison so teams can move from debrief to revised draft in days rather than weeks; see Evidano features.

If you are preparing a digital access survey or planning cognitive interviews, Try Evidano for free to pilot AI-enabled workflows for transcription, coding, and rapid revision.