Social workers engage in cross-cultural research in order to understand how diverse populations cope with life situations, to identify risk and protective factors across cultures, and to evaluate the effectiveness of policies and programs on the well-being of individuals from different cultures. In order to do so, it is necessary to begin with meaningful, appropriate, and practical research instruments, yet such instruments are not always readily available, or they may be misleading or biased. In this clearly written pocket guide, social work researchers will find a concise, easy-to-follow explanation of how to develop and assess cross-cultural measures that sidestep such complications and provide reliable, valid data. Using a step-by-step approach, expert cross-cultural researcher Thanh V. Tran carefully explores the issues and methodology in cross-cultural measurement development in social work research and evaluation. The book draws on existing cross-cultural research in social sciences and related areas to illustrate how to formulate research questions, select observable statistics, understand cross-cultural translation, evaluate and implement measurement equivalence, and discern quality within practices of measurement development. Tran also discusses how to use statistics software programs such as SPSS to generate data for LISREL analyses, providing enough detail to help readers grasp the programs' applications in this area but not so much as to overwhelm. This concise text offers a wealth of knowledge about using and interpreting the use of culturally relevant research instruments. Doctoral students and social researchers in the field seeking guidance in selecting and adapting such instruments in their studies, or developing and assessing their own, will find it a terrific source of essential information for their work. For additional resources, visit http://www.oup.com/us/pocketguides.

Earlier edition published as: Developing cross-cultural measurement.

Social workers engage in cross-cultural research in order to understand how diverse populations cope with life situations, to identify risk and protective factors across cultures, and to evaluate the effectiveness of policies and programs on the well-being of individuals from different cultures. In order to do so, it is necessary to begin with meaningful, appropriate, and practical research instruments, yet such instruments are not always readily available, or they may be misleading or biased. In this clearly written pocket guide, social work researchers will find a concise, easy-to-follow explanation of how to develop and assess cross-cultural measures that sidestep such complications and provide reliable, valid data. Using a step-by-step approach, expert cross-cultural researcher Thanh V. Tran carefully explores the issues and methodology in cross-cultural measurement development in social work research and evaluation. The book draws on existing cross-cultural research in social sciences and related areas to illustrate how to formulate research questions, select observable statistics, understand cross-cultural translation, evaluate and implement measurement equivalence, and discern quality within practices of measurement development. Tran also discusses how to use statistics software programs such as SPSS to generate data for LISREL analyses, providing enough detail to help readers grasp the programs' applications in this area but not so much as to overwhelm. This concise text offers a wealth of knowledge about using and interpreting the use of culturally relevant research instruments. Doctoral students and social researchers in the field seeking guidance in selecting and adapting such instruments in their studies, or developing and assessing their own, will find it a terrific source of essential information for their work. For additional resources, visit http://www.oup.com/us/pocketguides.

The aim of this encyclopedia is to provide a comprehensive reference work on scientific and other scholarly research on the quality of life, including health-related quality of life research or also called patient-reported outcomes research. Since the 1960s two overlapping but fairly distinct research communities and traditions have developed concerning ideas about the quality of life, individually and collectively, one with a fairly narrow focus on health-related issues and one with a quite broad focus. In many ways, the central issues of these fields have roots extending to the observations and speculations of ancient philosophers, creating a continuous exploration by diverse explorers in diverse historic and cultural circumstances over several centuries of the qualities of human existence. What we have not had so far is a single, multidimensional reference work connecting the most salient and important contributions to the relevant fields. Entries are organized alphabetically and cover basic concepts, relatively well established facts, lawlike and causal relations, theories, methods, standardized tests, biographic entries on significant figures, organizational profiles, indicators and indexes of qualities of individuals and of communities of diverse sizes, including rural areas, towns, cities, counties, provinces, states, regions, countries and groups of countries.

This volume contains contributions from 24 internationally known scholars covering a broad spectrum of interests in cross-cultural theory and research. This breadth is reflected in the diversity of the topics covered in the volume, which include theoretical approaches to cross-cultural research, the dimensions of national cultures and their measurement, ecological and economic foundations of culture, cognitive, perceptual and emotional manifestations of culture, and bicultural and intercultural processes. In addition to the individual chapters, the volume contains a dialog among 14 experts in the field on a number of issues of concern in cross-cultural research, including the relation of psychological studies of culture to national development and national policies, the relationship between macro structures of a society and shared cognitions, the integration of structural and process models into a coherent theory of culture, how personal experiences and cultural traditions give rise to intra-cultural variation, whether culture can be validly measured by self-reports, the new challenges that confront cultural psychology, and whether psychology should strive to eliminate culture as an explanatory variable.

Adapting Psychological Tests and Measurement Instruments for Cross-Cultural Research provides an easy-to-read overview of the methodological issues and best practices for cross-cultural adaptation of psychological instruments. Although the development of cross-cultural test adaption methodology has advanced in recent years, the discussion is often pitched at an expert level and requires an advanced knowledge of statistics, psychometrics and scientific methodology. This book, however, introduces the history and concepts of cross-cultural psychometrics in a pedagogic and simple manner. It evaluates key ethical, cultural, methodological and legal issues in cross-cultural psychometrics and provides a guide to test adaptation, data analysis and interpretation. Written in an accessible manner, this book builds an understanding of the methodological, ethical and legal complexities of cross-cultural test adaptation and presents methods for test adaptation, including the basic statistical procedures for evaluating the equivalence of test versions. It would be the ideal companion for undergraduate students and those new to psychometrics.

A new and updated definitive resource for survey questionnaire testing and evaluation Building on the success of the first Questionnaire Development, Evaluation, and Testing (QDET) conference in 2002, this book brings together leading papers from the Second International Conference on Questionnaire Design, Development, Evaluation, and Testing (QDET2) held in 2016. The volume assesses the current state of the art and science of QDET; examines the importance of methodological attention to the questionnaire in the present world of information collection; and ponders how the QDET field can anticipate new trends and directions as information needs and data collection methods continue to evolve. Featuring contributions from international experts in survey methodology, Advances in Questionnaire Design, Development, Evaluation and Testing includes latest insights on question characteristics, usability testing, web probing, and other pretesting approaches, as well as: Recent developments in the design and evaluation of digital and self-administered surveys Strategies for comparing and combining questionnaire evaluation methods Approaches for cross-cultural and cross-national questionnaire development New data sources and methodological innovations during the last 15 years Case studies and practical applications Advances in Questionnaire Design, Development, Evaluation and Testing serves as a forum to prepare researchers to meet the next generation of challenges, making it an excellent resource for researchers and practitioners in government, academia, and the private sector.