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The importance of using research instruments that ask the ‘right’ questions is critical in VET [vocational education and training] research. This paper focuses on the process of developing survey questionnaires and highlights the issues involved in getting the ‘right’ questions. It is based on recent research, undertaking an NREC project that involved a national survey of private providers of vocational education and training. The process of cognitive interviewing (Willis 1999) - in particular, verbal probing techniques - was used to fine-tune the survey instrument before a pilot study was conducted to further ‘test’ the tool under actual survey conditions. This paper reports the outcomes of this process, with particular emphasis on the process of cognitive interviewing - how it worked in practice, the advantages and disadvantages of the process and the resultant impact the outcomes had on the final survey tool that was used to collect data for the main survey.