Summary
Approximately 14 million Americans receive inadequate mental health care largely because of linguistic and cultural barriers. This paper reviews some of the problems involved in collecting data on psychopathology in a community when the investigator is not a participant of the culture. Researchers, when comparing cultures for data on psychopathology generated by community interviews, are confronted with problems of two different kinds. In the first place, there is the problem of agreement on “what the dataare”. To make the measurement reliable, the same questions should be asked in the same sequential order and the answers should be scored the same way.
But there is a second problem, that of ascertaining “what the dataindicate”. For measurement to be valid, the wording and the sequence of the questions might have to be changed, as might the conditions of interviewing and the scoring of the answers. Transcultural interviewing involves three steps: getting to the culture, designing the instrument, and collecting the data. The paper reviews the precautions that must be taken at each step to make the measurement both valid and reliable. Since words are used as signs and symbols, comparability across cultures is established by the content of the questions as well as by the intent of the investigator; not only by the data being generated, but also by the reciprocal connections between these data and the facts being inferred. These connections are determined by the logic of the operation of measurement itself.
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de Figueiredo, J.M., Lemkau, P.V. Psychiatric interviewing across cultures: Some problems and prospects. Soc Psychiatry 15, 117–121 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00578142
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00578142