facit.org: Multicultural Instrument Development and Consulting

Through our experience in the translation of both FACIT and non-FACIT measures, we have found ourselves repeatedly constrained by the limitations of the source questionnaires in English. Some were developed in a single culture (usually North America) with little forethought given to the problems readers in other cultures would encounter when attempting to answer the questionnaires even after translation into their own languages. Therefore, we realized the importance of multicultural instrument development, which places greater emphasis on gathering input from a variety of cultures during development and on using language in the source questionnaire that is not overly colloquial or metaphorical, but simple to understand and to translate. Multicultural instrument development includes sequential, parallel, and simultaneous approaches to the inclusion of data and input from different cultures. Although the sequential approach was once the standard approach, we have begun to incorporate parallel approaches to our new instrument development projects with both FACIT and non-FACIT questionnaires. The multicultural approaches are challenging but ultimately very rewarding in that the measures developed are much more relevant across cultures and are more suitable for translation. In addition to offering multicultural instrument development as a service to clients, we are also involved in research on such methodologies to improve the process and find better ways to accomplish the goal of cross-cultural measurement.