Optimizing Questionnaire Design in Cross‐National and Cross‐Cultural Surveys

Questionnaire development in cross-national/cultural surveys starts with the same challenges facing monolingual/cultural surveys. The individual measures need to be reliable and valid, and to function well among the target population. But for cross-national/cultural surveys, the development process is more complex and challenging. The individual measures and the scales must achieve a high level of functional equivalence across surveys and minimize comparison error. Achieving this is not easy. First, one needs to optimize wording comparability by using rigorous translation procedures and by examining results for differences due to measurement variation resulting from errant or at least suboptimal translations. Second, one needs to consider whether there are structural/cultural differences (besides language) undermining comparability. Third, when multi-item scales are involved, one needs equivalence testing. If equivalence is not established, one needs to identify the source of the non-equivalence. Fortunately, increasingly operational and methodological techniques have been developed to deal with these challenges.