Exploring the contributions of expert review and cognitive interviewing to evaluating the content validity of items for a new measure of adolescent social communication, the transition pragmatics interview.

Interventions to facilitate improvement in adolescent social communication are more effective when they are tailored to adolescents' individual profiles of ability. Current social communication assessments for adolescents are not designed to identify their profiles of ability for settings beyond compulsory education. To address this gap, we developed the Transition Pragmatics Interview (TPI). The purpose of these studies was to evaluate the content validity of items developed for the TPI using expert review and cognitive interviewing. Cognitive interviewing is recommended in health-related measurement standards but is not widely reported for assessments of developmental language disorders. Six speech-language pathologists participated in the expert review, rating how well TPI items represented facets of social communication ability. All questions were rated as representative of their intended construct. Eight adolescents (age 14-21) of varied social communication abilities participated in the cognitive interview study to explore whether items were understood as intended by the developers. Participants responded to each item while a researcher observed their response process and asked questions to identify the respondents' thinking about the items. Transcribed responses were classified based on whether they indicated a construct-irrelevant difficulty with the item. Nine of 52 items were identified with recall difficulties, ambiguous wording or potential sources of bias. Cognitive interviewing complemented expert review by identifying issues with content validity not identified by expert review. Items with construct-irrelevant barriers to response will be modified and re-evaluated prior to field testing.