A Psychometric Theory of Evaluations of Item and Scale Translations

Charles L. Hulin

166 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Psychometric Methodologies and Testing Translation Studies and Practices Psychological Testing and Assessment

Abstract

A psychometric theory of equivalence of meanings of items and item responses in original and target language versions of psychological scales is developed. Equivalence of translated items is defined in terms of probabilities of a specified response being evoked by two stimuli among individuals with the same amount of the latent trait assessed by the items. In the case of translated items that form psychological scales, the stimuli are the source and target language versions of the item. The specified responses are correct or positive responses to these measurement items. The extent to which items are equivalent across the different language versions can be evaluated within the framework of item response theory (Lord & Novick, 1968). Methods of equating scales containing culturally general, etic, items and culturally specific, emic, items are outlined. These techniques can be used to increase the cultural relevance of scales by generating and including emic concepts while permitting comparisons across cultures and languages on the basis of scales equated with reference to the common, etic items. Results of applications of these techniques to one instrument (the Job Descriptive Index; Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969) translated into five languages and administered to approximately 3,000 employees in six countries are discussed briefly.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 166 citations exist upstream.

References

1970Back-Translation for Cross-Cultural Research 1969Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores 2012Applications of Item Response Theory To Practical Testing Problems 1962The relation of bilingualism to intelligence.1976Cross-Cultural Universals of Affective Meaning 1983Developing a Common Metric in Item Response Theory 1974The Dependability of Behavioral Measurements: Theory of Generalizability for Scores and Profiles.1977Translation: Applications and Research.

Cited by

1998Questionnaires in translation 1997An item response theory analysis of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist--Revised.1998Approaches to equivalence in cross-cultural and cross-national survey research 1999Identifying the Causes of DIF in Translated Verbal Items 2018Understanding students’ preferences toward the smart classroom learning environment: Development and validation of an instrument 2004Quantitative Methods for Verifying Semantic Equivalence of Translated Research Instruments: A Chinese Version of the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale.

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.