This course introduces you to cross-cultural research, and notably to what it means to produce comparable multilingual questionnaires that ensure data quality, comparability, and ultimately valid conclusions in research. On day 1, you will be introduced to types, aims, and basic concepts of cross-cultural research, and particularly to the concepts of “equivalence” and “bias.” Furthermore, we will delve into questionnaire design in cross-cultural contexts. Time will be devoted to methods of evaluating and pretesting questionnaire items, such as cognitive interviewing, to ensure that items indeed measure what they are supposed to measure and are comparative across languages. On day 2, you will learn how the quality of survey questions can be estimated. You will be introduced to a tool (i.e., the Survey Quality Predictor [SQP]) that will allow you to predict the quality of your own survey items and that you can use for translation checks when dealing with different language versions of the same item. You will be trained in a very hands-on manner how you can implement the tool in your own research project. On day 3, you will learn about the crucial step of questionnaire translation, and (best practice) translation and assessment methods that are typically discussed in this context. Furthermore, you will learn about aspects to consider in questionnaire translation and potential error sources. The course will conclude with a wrap-up session, bringing all aspects together. On each day, you will gain hands-on experience on some of the methods and tools presented to get an idea of challenges or subtleties inherent in cross-cultural research - and you will have the opportunity to marvel about and discuss cultural and linguistic (dis)similarities!

 

The full syllabus of the course, including the day-to-day schedule will be published here in April.

You will find the course useful if:

By the end of the course you will:

 

You need access to a laptop or personal computer to successfully participate in this course and to work on exercises/assignments. No software is required. This course does not include the use of statistical software.