Developing a low-cost technique for parallel cross-cultural instrument development

Abstract

Many approaches are used to prepare instruments for multicultural administration, depending on the scope, schedule and budget of the study. Sequential questionnaire development, the most common approach to developing cross-cultural instruments, is also the most affordable. Designers formulate and pretest an instrument in the source language, then translate it into the target language(s) using culture-specific tailoring. In contrast, parallel development incorporates target cultures throughout the design and pretesting process. The disadvantages to parallel development are that it is expensive, time-consuming and subject to version control problems. Question Appraisal System (QAS) is a coding tool for pretesting instruments. The QAS is supported by an item taxonomy of the cognitive demands of a question and documents the features that may lead to response error. Results of the appraisal are used to revise question wording, response wording, questionnaire format and question ordering. This article describes research conducted to update the QAS to identify problems due to cross-cultural and cross-linguistic application of questions.