Date: Friday, 6/12/2020

Room: Virtual Conference

Alisú Schoua-Glusberg, Erika Martinez-Picazo, Daniela Glusberg.

Instructions for self-administered survey instruments do not always receive enough attention during question evaluation. Focus tends to be on the question stem and response categories’ formulation. This is particularly true when the respondent instructions are standard English language instructions typically used in surveys.

The instruction to “Mark (or Select) all that apply” is the most common formulation to indicate to  respondents that multiple responses are acceptable and/or desired in a question. In U.S. translations into Spanish, this instruction is most often translated as “Marque todo lo que aplique” or “Marque todo lo que corresponda”. While these are direct translations of the instruction and may work well for Spanish monolingual respondents with higher levels of education and more exposure to surveys, we question whether this instruction works well for most respondents that answer surveys in Spanish in the U.S.

Comparing the frequency with which Spanish-speaking respondents select multiple answers may give an answer to this question. However, it is important to test this in questions where conceptually respondents believe multiple responses are possible. For instance, in the context of race/ethnicity questions, a question about background with a mark all that apply instruction may yield multiple answers from English language respondents. This same question in translation, asking about “origen” [origin] has shown in cognitive testing that it is treated as a “select one only” because respondents understand it as asking about country of birth, and “You cannot be born in more than one place.”

In this presentation we will discuss different ways of translating this instruction and discuss the potential for differential selection of multiple responses when the instruction is translated in different ways.