Cross-Cultural Web Probing

Survey measures should be valid, reliable, and, on top of that, comparable when implemented in cross-cultural research. Therefore, survey measures should be pretested before the actual data collection. A valuable pretesting tool for cross-cultural research is web probing. Web probing implements probing techniques from cognitive interviewing in web survey and is particularly useful for the assessment of validity and comparability of survey measures. In this chapter, we discuss the origin of the web probing approach in cognitive interviewing, explain the approach and the different probing techniques (category-selection, specific, and comprehension probing), and illustrate the potential of web probing with different empirical examples. In addition, relevant methodological recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of web probing will be presented. We also comment on additional issues to consider when web probing is implemented in a cross-cultural context (e.g., translation, cultural expertise).