GUIDE addresses survey design challenges

Recognising that responding to survey questions is a complex process that requires respondents to be able and willing to perform multiple cognitive tasks, GUIDE (Growing Up In Digital Europe: EuroCohort) is working on developing questions for the first European comparative cohort study on the well-being of children and young people from birth to 24 years of age.

To answer survey questions, respondents must be able to understand the question, accurately recall the information, and respond by forming a judgment based on the response options. Because all elements of survey design, such as question wording, syntax, visual presentation, and response options, can affect respondents' understanding, one of the goals of survey question design is to make each step of the response process as simple as possible so that respondents can provide accurate answers with minimal effort.

In the course of the longitudinal study, children and young people of different ages will be surveyed, so GUIDE faces the problem of how to develop age-appropriate response options. Different scales and types of response options are used in the research. Frequency scales, Likert-type scales and emoticon scales are most often used in children's surveys and questionnaires. Frequency or intensity scales with four response options are often used to measure children's subjective well-being: “Never”, “Sometimes”, “Often”, “Almost always”. There is no consensus among researchers regarding the optimal number of response categories. Some use seven-point scales, while others even eleven-point scales. The GUIDE consortium believes that the use of more than five response categories would not be applicable even for older children, and the response options should cover the essence of the question.

There is also no consensus among researchers about children’s ability to understand, remember and reason over time and in context. Some researchers recommend avoiding time references in survey questions, or at least using them with caution. Researchers involved in the GUIDE have already conducted cognitive interviews aimed at finding out how children from different countries understand, interpret and process questions in order to offer a set of well-being questions that are age-appropriate and processed similarly across all tested countries. The focus of the testing was on comprehension, relevance and precise wording of questions, recall and reasoning over given time periods, and recall and reasoning using given response formats in children aged seven to eight. The cognitive interview study was conducted in three rounds in six countries: Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Spain and the United Kingdom. The total sample (N = 195) consisted of children aged seven to eight (48% girls). The original (English) first-round questionnaire and all changes after each round were translated into five languages (Catalan, Croatian, German, Hungarian and Latvian) using the translation, revision, evaluation, pre-testing and documentation method.

So far, knowledge about children’s ability to respond to survey questions, how they perceive specific types of survey questions, which design features help them to respond accurately, and which ones cause problems, is still very limited and fragmentary, and is based on data from only a few countries. However, data obtained from cognitive interviews with children aged seven to eight years allows GUIDE to test the applicability of selected well-being indicators, different time periods and different response scales to survey questions with children.

By addressing survey design challenges and subsequently implementing the first comparative cohort study on child and youth well-being in Europe, GUIDE will make a significant contribution to improving research methodology. By participating in GUIDE, Latvian researchers will have the opportunity to acquire the latest methodology and increase their scientific capacity.