The Dual-Focus Approach to Creating Bilingual Measures

Abstract

The dual-focus approach to creating bilingual research protocols requires a bilingual/bicultural research team, including indigenous researchers from the cultures being studied. The presence of indigenous researchers as full and equal members of the research team can guard against an unexamined exportation of ideas and methods developed in one culture to other cultural/linguistic communities. The team develops the research plan and a research protocol that express a given concept with equal clarity, affect, and level of usage simultaneously in two languages. The dualfocus method employs a concept-driven rather than a translation-driven approach to attain conceptual and linguistic equivalence. Examples of the application of this approach to creating new measures in Spanish and English, adapting existing measures, revising instructions to research participants, and correcting official translations are provided.Intercultural research is expanding and bringing with it a host of ethical and substantive concerns. An ethical concern arises when researchers from one culture or dominant group impose their vision of the proper focus of research and its methods on other cultures or among cultural/linguistic minorities in their own country. Gergen, Gulerce, Lock, and Misra (1996) warn that when Western concepts and methods guide research, as is often the case, the resulting product can be of little relevance to other cultures and has the potential to disregard and undermine alternate cultural traditions. Substantive problems can occur due to an unexamined transfer of concepts from one culture/language system to another and/or lack of equivalence in words used to express concepts in the two languages due to differences in affect, familiarity, and clarity. These can introduce serious biases into intercultural research, compromising the scientific integrity of the results. Any differences obtained using research protocols developed in one culture/language system and directly translated into another cannot simply be attributed to cultural differences because they could be, wholly or partly, an artifact of the nonequivalence of the two language versions of the protocol. What is needed is a method for creating research protocols that are constructed with an understanding of and respect for cultures being studied and have conceptual and linguistic equivalence in each language.

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