Researchers from Alzheimer’s Disease Centers (ADCs) across the United States with expertise in the assessment of Spanish-speaking elderly collaborated to create the official Spanish version of measures in the Uniform Data Set of the National Institute on Aging Alzheimer’s Disease Center Program. The present article describes this project, whose primary goal was to create Spanish instruments with cultural and linguistic equivalence to the English versions. The resulting Spanish versions make provisions for variations among Spanish-speaking groups in the United States of different nationalities, socio-cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds. A consensus-based translation and adaptation approach was used, and guiding principles and specific components of this process are summarized. The Spanish translation and adaptation of the Uniform Data Set measures became available online to ADCs in April 2007. Its creation is important, as the resulting effort provides standardized measures for the collection of cross-sectional and longitudinal data on a large cohort of Spanish-speaking elders across the country and facilitates collaborative research among ADCs.

Adaptations of the National Adult Reading Test (NART) for assessing premorbid intelligence in languages other than English requires (a) generating word-items that are rare and do not follow grapheme-to-phoneme mappings common in that language, and (b) subsequent validation against a cognitive battery normed on the population of interest. Such tests exist for Italy, France, Spain, and Argentina, all normed against national versions of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Given the varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States, the adaptation of the Spanish Word Accentuation Test (WAT) requires re-validating the original word list, plus possible new items, against a cognitive battery that has been normed on Spanish-speakers from many countries. This study reports the generation of 55 additional words and revalidation in a sample of 80 older, Spanish-dominant immigrants. The Batería Woodcock-Muñoz Revisada (BWM-R), normed on Spanish speakers from six countries and five U.S. states, was used to establish criterion validity. The original WAT word list accounted for 77% of the variance in the BWM-R and 58% of the variance in Ravens Colored Progressive Matrices, suggesting that the unmodified list possesses adequate predictive validity as an indicator of intelligence. Regression equations are provided for estimating BWM-R and Ravens scores from WAT scores. (JINS, 2006, 12, 391-399.)

Fieldworkers often use existing scales found in the literature to measure various social and psychological phenomena of interest to them. However, taking an instrument "off the shelf" sometimes involves making adjustments. This article is about making those adjustments. We address the use of existing instruments for fieldwork research purposes rather than for clinical or educational evaluation of individuals.Tests and scales developed for particular purposes with particular populations may not be appropriate for a very different population. There are a variety of responses to this issue. Researchers can create new scales from scratch. For example, for his work on stress and social status among young people in Samoa, McDade (2002) developed a new scale of status inconsistency assessing how Westernization affects traditional markers of social standing. A second option is to adapt existing scales by selecting those items that are culturally relevant and eliminating those that are not. For example, in a study of life satisfaction among

This paper explores how people reason about Alzheimer's disease by telling stories about others who have the disease. More specifically, the paper is a cross-linguistic investigation of the narrative and linguistic devices used by African Americans in English, Mexican Americans in Spanish, and refugees/immigrants from the former Soviet Union (to the United States of America) in Russian in their oral productions of such stories. We examine the narratives as instances of case-based reasoning in which lay people (non-medical professionals) distinguish, represent and ‘perform’ symptomatic behaviours and construct a ‘case’ of the disease as a way of probing the difference between the normal and the pathological in conversational contexts. In particular, we examine situations in which stories are accepted and confirmed and situations in which stories are contested and negotiated. Common narrative and discursive devices across the three languages include concatenation, intertextuality, conjunction and conjunctive adverbs, lexical opposition, past progressive tenses, temporal adverbials, reported speech and prosodic cues. The fine-grained analysis of these narrative and discursive devices lays bare the inner-workings of case-based reasoning as a conversational task and suggests specific linguistic tools for intervening in lay narrative reasoning in clinical settings and in public health messaging about Alzheimer's disease.

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