O processamento da informação e o rastreamento ocular em pré-teste de pesquisa

Abstract

The interest in understanding how information is processed by the human mind has increased considerably. With regard to the processing of information in the collection and interpretation of research data, different problems can cause serious errors, therefore, the survey pretesting is an important means to identify the variety of these problems that may contain in the questions, because these need to be well formulated and understood by respondents and interviewers. In this sense, new methodologies are being used as an alternative to minimize errors in the collection of research data. Thus, this research aims to investigate whether the use of eye tracking associated with cognitive interviewing is an effective complement in identifying problems in survey pretesting. For that, a quasi-experiment was carried out, with the use of eye tracking and cognitive interview to collect the data. In the control condition, the subjects answered an online questionnaire, while peculiar response behaviors were observed, to then undergo a cognitive interview with pre-programmed and probing questions. In the experimental treatment, eye movements were tracked while the subjects answered the same online questionnaire, observing peculiar reading behaviors and subsequently conducting the cognitive interview. With this, the two approaches were compared, in relation to the number of problems identified, types of problems and numbers of problematic questions. The questionnaire used was the General Decision-Making Style Inventory (GDMS) by Scott and Bruce (1995), which previously went through, in this research, a translation and cross-cultural adaptation. From the participation of 40 individuals, descriptive analyzes and inferential statistics were performed. As a result, it was found that the use of eye tracking associated with cognitive interviewing is an effective complement in identifying problems in survey pretesting, as it detected more problematic statements and made it possible to find more problems, as well as to determine the types of problems in research pretest questions.