A Method for Social Scientists to Adapt Instruments From One Culture to Another: The Case of the Job Descriptive Index

Abstract

This study outlined an adaptation procedure for the Job Descriptive Index Subscale of "type of work". The cross-translation or committee translation procedure asks two or more translators to translate a text from source to target language, and then an expert assesses the validity of these translations. Empirically, this method has three or more translators translate the instrument from English to Arabic and then an expert assesses the translations made by the three translators. A selection of 180 bilinguals attempt the source language and later attempt the target language instrument or the translated instrument supported by this method. The two versions are then compared through the ANOVA, correlation analyses and factor analyses. The results indicated a high reliability for the Arabic and English versions. The committee translation approach provides a valid method for translation, the results however, showed that the instrument in both languages do not show item-to-item similarity or equivalence.