International Collaboration in Questionnaire Design

Applied Research Program (ARP) staff are involved in several working collaborations with international researchers to develop "best practices" for questionnaire design, translation, and pretesting. The overall goal of this research is to develop measures (such as those of cancer risk factors) that are conceptually and analytically comparable across racial/ethnic/cultural groups, and across multinational surveys.

To coordinate this research area, ARP staff participate in the international QUEST group, composed of survey researchers from the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Spain.

Currently, ARP staff are working with researchers at Utrecht University on a common framework developed to report results of questionnaire testing and evaluation. The guidelines are intended for use by researchers and epidemiologists, and have been presented at the 2011 European Survey Research Association conference and the 2011 QUEST conference. The guidelines will be available after a period of review by the research community.