Online survey pretesting is no longer an ‘emerging’ method. During the COVID-19 pandemic, synchronous and asynchronous online pretesting techniques - and sometimes combined - have enabled (web) survey evaluations to continue remotely.
Mandy Sha and Dorothée Behr (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) will demonstrate how to increase the productivity, engagement, and ease of synchronous cognitive and usability testing using an accessible cloud-based video conferencing platform.
The pair will also discuss asynchronous ‘web probing’ as a supplement to face-to-face cognitive testing. Focused attention will be given to cross-cultural survey pretesting, which identifies potential measurement errors that may be attributed to non-comparable sociocultural contexts, translation, or both.
About the speakers
Mandy Sha is research scientist and PMP® with 20 years of experience at RTI International, NORC, the University of Chicago Survey Lab, and as an entrepreneur.
She is the lead editor of The Essential Role of Language in Survey Research and coauthored The Sociolinguistics of Survey Translation, How to Get Inclusive Research Design Right with pretesting, and articles on cross-cultural pretesting in the Survey Practice, Field Methods and Journal of Official Statistics.
Mandy also led the pretesting innovations section of the 2021 AAPOR/WAPOR task force report Quality in Comparative Surveys published by the American and World Associations for Public Opinion Research.
Dorothée Behr is a cross-cultural survey methodologist and head of the team Cross-Cultural Survey Methods at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
She has a doctorate in applied translation studies (topic: questionnaire translation) from the University of Mainz.
Her research and services (consultancy, training, and project involvement) focus on questionnaire translation as well as comparability of cross-national survey data, as assessed through web probing.
Dorothée has been involved in two research projects at GESIS (2010-2016) that aimed at developing and optimising the method of web probing. Since then, she has regularly used the method in different studies, mainly in the cross-national context to study equivalence of measures.
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