Expert appraisal is one of the most often used qualitative methods for pre-testing survey questionnaires. This method is often applied ambiguously and imprecisely in the early phases of questionnaire development. Expert coding systems should reduce the subjective and ambiguous application of expert appraisal, although little empirical evidence is available to support this claim. In this paper we compare and evaluate the precision of two expert coding systems in several experiments. It emerges that only one criterion distinguishes between the coding systems. As coding systems focus on different issues, both should be used simultaneously to maximise the results ofan expert appraisal
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