How to get value from a specific child element in XML using XmlReader?

you might need to do like this , problem i think is reader is not moving to text and because of that you are getting empty

        if(reader.ReadToDescendant("response"))
            {
                reader.Read();//this moves reader to next node which is text 
                result = reader.Value; //this might give value than 
                break;
            }

Above one is working for me you can try out at your end

I would use LINQ2XML..

XDocument doc=XDocument.Parse(xmlstr);
String response=doc.Elements("question")
                   .Where(x=>x.Attribute("id")==id)
                   .Single()
                   .Element("response")
                   .Value;