The Dual-Focus Approach to Creating Bilingual Measures

Abstract

The dual-focus approach to creating bilingual research protocols requires a bilingual/bicultural research team, including indigenous researchers from the cultures being studied. The presence of indigenous researchers as full and equal members of the research team can guard against an unexamined exportation of ideas and methods developed in one culture to other cultural/linguistic communities. The team develops the research plan and a research protocol that express a given concept with equal clarity, affect, and level of usage simultaneously in two languages. The dual-focus method employs a concept-driven rather than a translation-driven approach to attain conceptual and linguistic equivalence. Examples of the application of this approach to creating new measures in Spanish and English, adapting existing measures, revising instructions to research participants, and correcting official translations are provided.