Quality Assurance in LADO: Issues of Validity

Abstract

The Guidelines for the Use of Language Analysis in relation to Questions of National Origin in Refugee Cases (Language and National Origin Group, Int J Speech Lang Law 11(2):261–266. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v11i2.261, 2004) have been in existence for over a decade now. They have proved important in court hearings considering the quality of Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO) reports used by governments. However, there is little detailed information on how governments and their agencies are actually responding to and implementing the “Guidelines…”. Lingua, the Swiss government agency responsible for LADO in that country, recently commissioned a quality assurance study carried out by the authors. Large numbers of LADO reports were made available to the researchers, on the basis of which they were able to develop a comprehensive checklist of the kinds of questions to be dealt with in the language analyses, and the kinds of evidence and analytic methods needed to address these questions. This chapter describes the nature of the project, its methods and conclusions, all intended to support the quality and enhance the validity of LADO reports prepared by Lingua. Drawing on theories of validation in language testing research, it presents a framework (or a set of tools) that enables the systematic analysis of the quality of the evidence, of the quality of the interpretation of the evidence, and of the conclusions drawn, and thus ensures the rigour of the argumentation leading to conclusions about the individual concerned.