Information sharing preferences within buildings: Benefits of cognitive interviewing for enhancing a discrete choice experiment

To design and operate energy efficient and comfortable buildings it is important to know what the occu-pants' preferences for indoor environmental quality would be. These preferences are related to a range of personal characteristics that occupants may or may not be willing to share. Preparing materials for a forthcoming stated preference discrete choice experiment (SPDCE) aimed at investigating willingness of building occupants to share information, we conducted cognitive-interview pretesting with 12 partic-ipants to find out whether these materials were interpretable and meaningful. Qualitative analysis iden-tified seven important limitations, including misinterpretations and uncertainties arising from language and difficulties imagining the situation and options being described. Most participants expressed some desire for a deeper understanding and were not satisfied with the choices they were asked to make. We discuss how identifying these limitations assisted in refining these SPDCE materials, the potential cognitive interviewing has for enhancing the validity of study materials and the importance of better understanding when researching occupant behaviours. (c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.