Adapting cognitive interviewing for nursing research.

Cognitive interviewing (CI) has been used by instrument developers to examine how well an instrument generates the intended data when tested with prospective respondents. In using CI to test a new instrument to measure patients' perceptions of the quality of nursing care, the authors found challenges in applying a theory-based traditional CI approach derived from experimental psychology to more clinically oriented nursing research. The purposes of this article are to describe these challenges and the modifications of CI to capture the nursing care perspectives of hospitalized participants, and to present interpretive phenomenology as a theoretical orientation for clinically situated CI.