Cognitive interviewing (CI) is a pretesting technique that elicits respondents’ interpretations of survey questions as a means to evaluate and revise them. Vignettes are sometimes used as a part of the cognitive testing method. There has been little research on using vignettes in the testing of survey translations. This article examines the use of vignettes in two Spanish and English pretesting projects at the U.S. Census Bureau. The authors examine findings across English and Spanish cases in the two studies and discuss areas for future research.
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