“Anticipating Culture-Driven Perception Shifts in Multilingual Data Collection”, WAPOR 2022

cApStAn co-founder Steve Dept will be speaking on November 12, 2022, at WAPOR’s 75th Conference being held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on the topic of perception shifts in multilingual data collection. The talk is scheduled as part of session 12.4.1 on “Challenges of comparative research and international survey projects”, chaired by Kazimierz M. Slomczynski of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland. Devasmita Ghosh, cApStAn’s Business Development and Marketing Lead, will also be attending the conference.

In comparative research, equivalence is not an objective, it is an assumption. But even when survey questions are crafted with adaptation in mind, it is very challenging to anticipate how different groups in different regions, from different cultures and responding in different languages will perceive the questions. An informed reflection on the portability and adaptability of constructs is helpful, but insufficient. At WAPOR Steve and Eli will show how a quality assurance design that includes a translatability assessment, followed by pretesting in several languages, helped detect a significant number of culture-driven perception shifts, for which workarounds or adaptation notes could then be discussed, before the translation and adaptation into multiple languages began. This approach contributes to cross-cultural and cross-language comparability of the data collection instruments.