5/13/2021, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM 

Virtual Conference, Prerecorded Session

Daniela Glusberg, Research Support Services Inc 

Maria Payri, American Institutes for Research (AIR)

Erika Martinez Picazo, Research Support Services Inc. 

Alisú Schoua-Glusberg, Research Support Services Inc. 

Danielle Battle, American Institutes for Research (AIR) 

Everyday life under Covid-19 has, undoubtedly, influenced how respondents in the US interpret certain survey items. Questions about homeschooling, we hypothesize, may be among them. With schools across the country having shifted to remote learning via the internet, is homeschooling being understood as it was before March 2020? Surveys, particularly those having to do with topics related to education, often need to ask respondents if they homeschool their children, rather than sending them to a traditional public or private school, a physical building outside of their home. Translation into Spanish of these types of survey items has always been a challenge because of the lack of familiarity with the concept on the part of less acculturated immigrants and other monolingual Spanish speakers in the USIn the Summer of 2020, we conducted qualitative interviews to cognitively test changes to one of the National Household Education Surveys (NHES) instruments which included questions for parents about homeschooling their children. Our cognitive testing of the Spanish translation of these items can shed some light on these issues. We asked Spanish speakers about their familiarity with the concept of homeschooling, as well as their reactions to multiple definitions and various translations of the term. Despite their exposure to varied formulations and receiving an explicit instruction not to include any schooling at home after March 2020 that resulted from Covid-19 school closings, we still found lack of understanding that led to errors in Spanish speakers’ survey responses. In our presentation we will examine: pre-2020 issues with translating questions about homeschooling; possible confusion of remote learning experiences when we ask about homeschooling in 2020 and beyond; and the intersection of these two issues for monolingual Spanish speakers, through an examination of what we learned in our NHES testing.