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 2023 American Housing Survey (AHS). It included several questions about general health status of household members, and aspects of a home that could contribute to health problems. Other questions were about technical and safety issues in the home such as cooling problems, heat risk, and power outages. In addition, a few questions were about the homeownership status of survey respondents’ parents.

Results of 9 cognitive interviews, conducted remotely via Microsoft Teams in June 2022, include the following: 1) for questions about cooling problems or power outages, some respondents based their answers on information that was out of scope of the intended meaning of the question. These respondents recalled issues in the home that occurred more than a year ago, or that occurred outside of any power outages; 2) for questions about stairs in a home and related safety issues, some text did not apply for respondents in particular home types. Such respondents had difficulty answering based on the text presented since they lived in multi-unit homes other than apartment buildings, such as units that are part of a house or that have direct access from the outside.