In-house pretesting with Qualitative Pretest Interviews (QPI) - the example of SHARE

The pretesting of draft questionnaires is usually outsourced to survey agencies and supervised by research institutes. The paper introduces the rationale behind the alternative of establishing an in-house team of embedded interviewers for doing Qualitative Pretest Interviews (QPI) and illustrates the first steps of its establishment in the frame of the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). SHARE is a multi-disciplinary and cross-national panel research infrastructure for studying the effects of health, social, economic and environmental policies over the life-course in 28 European countries and Israel.

The QPI is a novel method of pretest interviewing for improving the quality of standardised research. By advocating a comprehensive consideration of qualitative-interpretive methodology, the QPI transfers the idea of intersubjective understanding in everyday communication to the situation of pretest interviewing. Following the requirements of qualitative research the QPI relies heavily on the familiarity of researchers and interviewers with all aspects of the research topic as well as the purpose of single items and item batteries. Therefore, the establishment and training of an in-house team for pretest-interviewing combines the advantages of substantive expertise with the possibility of immediate and stepwise revision of standardised instruments. This alternative can improve, accelerate and focus the process of pretesting. The paper concludes with a discussion of advantages and limits of this alternative.