At the request of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), staff from the Center for Behavioral Science Methods (CBSM) cognitively pretested new and revised survey questions for the 2019 American Housing Survey (AHS). It included several questions about home accessibility, and post-secondary education. Other questions were about contact information, number of floors in a home, home equipment, hazards or appliance breakdowns, and home improvements.

Results of 29 cognitive interviews conducted between April and June 2018 include the following: 1) several respondents found it challenging to answer home accessibility questions about "difficulty" with certain household tasks. These respondents indicated that they or someone else in the household has occasional difficulty with certain tasks but that this difficulty is not an everyday occurrence, and/or has a condition that could return at a future time and affect these; 2) respondents found it challenging to answer separate home accessibility questions about difficulty "using" certain rooms in the household. These respondents differed over whether difficulty reaching things in one or more rooms was sufficient to count as difficulty "using" these rooms, if it did not stem from a severe disability.