Despite the many surveys of older people, there has been remarkably little research on how they respond to interviews. As far as we know, there has been no research on their response to telephone interviews. In an effort to start filling the lack, we conducted cognitive interviews with respondents to dual more, telephone and mail, questionnaire.

The Medical Car Quality Monitoring System (MQMSS) is designed to obtain information from Medicare beneficiaries to help monitor and improve the services they are offered. Because the sample will be drawn from the file of beneficiaries, the address information should be good. However, there are no telephone numbers on the file. After some testing to find out how difficult it would be to obtain number, the Health Care Financing Administration decided that a dual-mode survey would be necessary. Therefore, our mission was to design comparable mail and telephone questionnaires at a 6th grade reading level with closed-end responses and a logical flow.

We first designed a draft questionnaire making certain that all the questions were directed toward measuring progress towards the HCFA responsibilities to its beneficiaries and the goals