 |
| ||||
| Title: | ESS | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date of publishing: | March 28, 2011 | |||
| Hits: | 883 | |||
| Category: | Other content | |||
ESS
For Round 5 of the European Social Survey, cApStAn was appointed to verify a selection of (new) ESS questions for all 37 national versions of the 27 participating countries, totalling 25 languages. The questions belonged to the "Trust in justice" and "Socio-demographics" modules of the ESS questionnaire.
The ESS is an academically-driven social survey, funded through the European Commission's Framework Programmes, which sets very high standards in terms of cross-country equivalence, reliability and validity. It was awarded the prestigious Descartes prize for scientific research projects.
In coordination with the German research institute GESIS, cApStAn designed a Translation and Verification Follow-up Form (TVFF) for the European Social Survey, in which countries documented the translation and adaptation history of the questionnaire items and cApStAn verifiers described their interventions. A representative from GESIS was also invited to attend the verifier's training webinar, in which 25 verifiers from 25 different countries performed hands-on exercises with the TVFF. It was a fine experience to have our Russia-based colleague Sasha type a sentence (in Cyrillic) to edit an Excel file on Laura's computer in Finland, while the meeting was launched from cApStAn HQ in Brussels and all verifiers could watch the sentence appear on their monitors throughout the globe, in real time.
Preparation work has begun to fine tune linguistic quality control and equivalence checking in ESS Round 6: it is now confirmed that cApStAn will verify national versions of ESS Round 6 questionnaire items in spring 2012.
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."