Respondents' ratings of expressions from response scales: a two-country, two-language investigation on equivalence and translation

"The paper presents German-American research on expressions from response scales used in cross-national and cross-lingual survey research. Respondents in the United States and Germany were asked to rate expression for the degrees of intensity they were held to express. The scales used were scales of agreement, importance and for/against. The findings of the study raise as many questions as they answer. Translation-based pairings of expressions across English and German work well but not perfectly. Symmetrical response scales often lead to artificial-sounding 'scalespeak' constructions: their effect on scale responses is unknown. Well-matched translation pairings were sometimes differently scored across the populations. Germans and Americans differed in the range of scale points they employed and in the range of vocabulary used to 'explain' expressions. The study is seen as a first step towards understanding cross-national response scale issues." (author's abstract)