The outbreak of COVID-19 has created new challenges for face-to-face research activities, including conducting in-person cognitive interviews. The first lockdown in Germany in mid-March 2020 coincided with the preparation phase of a pretest that we planned to conduct face-to-face in our pretest lab in Mannheim. Since we were no longer able to interview participants in person, we quickly had to come up with alternative ways of conducting pretests without simply switching to the online mode and testing the questionnaires via web probing. This blog post tells the story of how we switched to remote cognitive interviewing and reflects the experience we have gathered with this method over the last 12 months.

DOI: 10.34879/gesisblog.2021.34