“Please speak in Hindi”: Cognitive interviews to improve measurement of digital access in North India
Zenia Taluja, Anjora Sarangi, Pankaj Mishra, Chandrika Prasad Verma, Manjula Sharma, Osama Ummer, Arjun Khanna, Sara Chamberlain, Priyadarshini Krishnaraj, Megha S. Hudda, Amnesty E. LeFevre, Kerry Scott · 2026
Read “Please speak in Hindi”: Cognitive interviews to improve measurement of digital access in North India by Zenia Taluja, Anjora Sarangi, Pankaj Mishra, Chandrika Prasad Verma, Manjula Sharma, Osama Ummer, Arjun Khanna, Sara Chamberlain, Priyadarshini Krishnaraj, Megha S. Hudda, Amnesty E. LeFevre, Kerry Scott (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13411880.txt.
Description
Zenia Taluja leads a team in 2026 stress-testing draft survey questions about phone and internet access with villagers in Uttar Pradesh, India. Measuring the digital gender gap demands questions people actually understand. One hundred one cognitive interviews, more with women than men, walked through 118 Hindi-translated draft items.
Seven problem families surfaced, from wrong word choices and tangled phrasing to alien ideas like online privacy or hacking. Questions about permission to use a phone tangled with ideas of help, since phones get shared. Rating scales and vague time frames confused many respondents. Nearly every question needed revision despite careful translation, which proves the worth of this slow checking step.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Zenia Taluja, Anjora Sarangi, Pankaj Mishra, Chandrika Prasad Verma, Manjula Sharma, Osama Ummer, Arjun Khanna, Sara Chamberlain, Priyadarshini Krishnaraj, Megha S. Hudda, Amnesty E. LeFevre, Kerry Scott |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 57 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |