Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

278 Chapter 10
that she or he can fully understand the subtleties you want to convey in your
questionnaire items.
Next, ask another bilingual person, who is a native speaker of your language,
to translate the questionnaire back into that language. This back translation
should be almost identical to the original questionnaire you wrote. If it
isn’t, then something was lost in one of the two translations. You’d better find
out which one it was and correct the problem.
Beck and Gable (2000) developed a scale for screening postpartum women
for depression and then translated the scale into Spanish (Beck and Gable
2003). One item on the original scale was ‘‘I felt like my emotions were on a
roller coaster.’’ The first translator offered two options for this: ‘‘Sentí un sube
y baja emocional’’ and ‘‘Sentí un desequilibrio emocional.’’ The second translator
translated these as ‘‘I felt like my emotions were up and down’’ and ‘‘I
felt emotional instability’’ (ibid.:69). Not exactly the same feeling as ‘‘I felt
like my emotions were on a roller coaster,’’ but close. Do you go with one of
the two Spanish translations offered? Which one? Or do you keep looking for
something better in Spanish? The answer is that you sit down with both translators,
talk it through, and come to a consensus.
You can also use back translation to check the content of open-ended interviews,
but be warned: This is tough work. Daniel Reboussin (1995) interviewed
Diola women who had come from southwestern Senegal to Dakar in
search of work. All the women used French at work, but they preferred Diola
for interviews. Reboussin, who speaks French, spoke very little Diola, so he
worked with an interpreter—a man named Antoine Badji—to develop an
interview schedule in French, which Badji translated into Diola.
During the interviews, Badji asked questions in Diola and Reboussin audiotaped
the responses. After each interview, Badji translated each tape (orally)
into French. Reboussin transcribed the French translations, translating into
English as he went. Then he read his English transcriptions back to Badji,
translating (orally) into French as he read. That way, Badji could confirm or
disconfirm Reboussin’s understanding of Badji’s French rendering of the
tapes.
As I said, this was tough work. It took Reboussin and Badji 17 weeks to
conduct 30 interviews and get them all down into English.
The Response Rate Problem
Mailed questionnaires can be very, very effective, but there is one problem
with them that all survey researchers watch for: getting enough of them back.
In 1936, the Literary Digest sent out 10 million straw poll ballots in an attempt