comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

of Mexico, it means wrist. This patient had a broken wrist; someone had improperly
translated espinilla to shin due to regional language differences 10 .
As noted elsewhere in the thesis, in 2007 two focus groups, one mono-lingual Chinese
and one bilingual in English and Chinese, were organised in Zhengzhou City to discuss
and vet the SVS translation and to verify that the questionnaire items did in fact related
to expectations of cultural values in China. The consensus of focus groups was that the
translations were sufficiently comparable and the items did in fact reflect cultural values
in China.
SAMPLE SELECTION AND DATA COLLECTION
This research project was initiated in 2004 with data collection in Guangzhou City,
Guangdong Province, PRC. Throughout 2004, 500 simplified Chinese character (hanzi)
versions of the demographic data sheet, the LBDQXII, and the Schwartz Values Survey
SVS58, a 58-item questionnaire, were distributed opportunistically and randomly to
businesspeople willing to volunteer to participate in Guangzhou City by hand delivery
and picked up by paid student assistants arranged by an administrator at Sun Yat-Sun
University. The survey was anonymous. From this distribution 246 valid surveys were
obtained. As several surveys had an acceptable amount of missing data (completing no
less than 80% of the items defining dimensions), the cell N in correlations and analyses
of variance are almost always less than 246.
Using random quota sampling, data collection in New Zealand was initiated in
December 2004 and completed in 2006. In order to maximise distribution of subjects
throughout the country a mailing list was generated from the Kompass database for
New Zealand to geographically cover the major cities in the country by selecting
managing director (CEO) and other names of company employees provided in the
database. Surveys were mailed with a cover letter (see Appendix 4 - Surveys) along with
a stamped, addressed return envelope. The instructions (See Appendix 4 – Surveys)
indicated that the survey could be copied and distributed to others, and that any of the
working personnel in the organisation could complete the survey.
10
One can never be certain of the validity of language anecdotes reported by U.S. English-only-speakers;
in Maya espinilla used in a phrase can refer to “face” of a body part, e.g., face of the shin, knee, foot, and
perhaps wrist. Wrist would normally be referred to by a Maya as muñeca de la mano, “neck of the hand”,
“neck” being the usual usage for joints in the extremities. There are no reports of variations of the use of
espinilla in Spanish dialects.
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