If survey researchers could choose a superpower, they might opt for telepathy – the ability to read people’s minds. But in a recent experiment, we were interested the geopolitical kind of “superpower” instead.

Pew Research Center has a long history of asking survey respondents which country they think is the world’s top economic or military power.

However, these questions may not capture all the attributes that make a country a superpower. They also ask respondents to choose from a defined list of countries that has remained consistent over time and may not reflect emerging geopolitical trends. Finally, because of their format, these questions don’t allow us to reflect the views of respondents who think multiple countries (or no countries) are global superpowers.

So, we wondered: Could we write a new question that addresses these limits and might be included on our mixed-mode, cross-national Global Attitudes Survey?

A cognitive interview is a qualitative survey method in which a trained interviewer asks a respondent a series of questions, as if they were taking a normal survey.

However, interviewers also ask follow-up questions, prompting respondents to share details about their thought process when answering or about what specific terms or phrases mean to them.

This method allows researchers to better understand how survey questions are interpreted by actual respondents. Plus, it can provide insights such as how difficult a question is to answer or if any word or phrase in a question is confusing.

In this post, we’ll share what we learned through cognitive interviews and a split-form survey experiment that we fielded on the Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel in March 2026.

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