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Reaching Spanish-Speakers in Self-Administered Surveys
Abstract
Decisions on public policy can be affected if important segments of the population are systematically excluded from the data used to drive the decisions. In the US, Spanishspeakers make up an important subgroup that surveys conducted in English-only underrepresent. This subgroup differs in a variety of characteristics and they are less likely to respond to surveys in English-only. These factors lead to nonresponse biases that are problematic for survey estimates. For surveys conducted by mail, one solution is to include both English and Spanish materials in the survey package. For addresses in the US where Spanish-speakers are likely to be living, this approach is effective, but it still may omit some non-English-speakers. Traditionally, including both English and Spanish materials for addresses not identified as likely to have Spanish-speakers was considered problematic due to concerns of a backlash effect. The backlash effect is that predominantly English-speakers might respond at a lower rate because of the inclusion of Spanish materials. Prior research found no evidence of a backlash, but used a twophase approach with a short screener questionnaire to identify the eligible population for an education survey. In this paper, we report on experiments in two surveys that extend the previous research to criminal victimization and health communication single-phase surveys. These experiments test the effect of the inclusion of Spanish language materials for addresses not identified as likely to have Spanish-speakers. Our findings confirm most results of the previous research; however we find no substantial increase in Spanish-only participation when the materials are offered in both languages for addresses that are not likely to have Spanish-speakers. We offer some thoughts on these results and directions for future research, especially with respect to collecting data by the Internet.
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We describe the challenges in recruiting Spanish-speaking HINTS respondents and strategies used to improve rates and quality of responses among Spanish-speaking Latinos. Cognitive interviewing techniques helped to better understand how Spanish-speaking Latinos were interpreting the survey questions, and the extent to which these interpretations matched English-speaking respondents' interpretations. Some Spanish-speaking respondents had difficulty with the questions because of a lack of access to health care. Additionally, Spanish-speaking respondents had a particularly hard time answering questions that were presented in a grid format. We describe the cognitive interview process, and consider the impact of format changes on Spanish-speaking people's responses and response quality. We discuss challenges that remain in understanding health information needs of non-English-speakers.
This article reviews unit nonresponse in cross-sectional household surveys, the consequences of the nonresponse on the bias of the estimates, and methods of adjusting for it. We describe the development of models for nonresponse bias and their utility, with particular emphasis on the role of response propensity modeling and its assumptions. The article explores the close connection between data collection protocols, estimation strategies, and the resulting nonresponse bias in the estimates. We conclude with some comments on the current state of the art and the need for future developments that expand our understanding of the response phenomenon.
The lack of full participation in sample surveys threatens the inferential value of the survey method. We review a set of
conceptual developments and experimental findings that appear to be informative about causes of survey participation; offer
an integration of that work with findings from the more traditional statistical and survey methodological literature on nonresponse;
and, given the theoretical structure, deduce potentially promising paths of research toward the understanding of survey participation.
Fifty-five million Americans speak a non-English primary language at home, but little is known about health disparities for children in non-English-primary-language households. Our study objective was to examine whether disparities in medical and dental health, access to care, and use of services exist for children in non-English-primary-language households.
The National Survey of Childhood Health was a telephone survey in 2003-2004 of a nationwide sample of parents of 102 353 children 0 to 17 years old. Disparities in medical and oral health and health care were examined for children in a non-English-primary-language household compared with children in English- primary-language households, both in bivariate analyses and in multivariable analyses that adjusted for 8 covariates (child's age, race/ethnicity, and medical or dental insurance coverage, caregiver's highest educational attainment and employment status, number of children and adults in the household, and poverty status).
Children in non-English-primary-language households were significantly more likely than children in English-primary-language households to be poor (42% vs 13%) and Latino or Asian/Pacific Islander. Significantly higher proportions of children in non-English-primary-language households were not in excellent/very good health (43% vs 12%), were overweight/at risk for overweight (48% vs 39%), had teeth in fair/poor condition (27% vs 7%), and were uninsured (27% vs 6%), sporadically insured (20% vs 10%), and lacked dental insurance (39% vs 20%). Children in non-English-primary-language households more often had no usual source of medical care (38% vs 13%), made no medical (27% vs 12%) or preventive dental (14% vs 6%) visits in the previous year, and had problems obtaining specialty care (40% vs 23%). Latino and Asian children in non-English-primary-language households had several unique disparities compared with white children in non-English-primary-language households. Almost all disparities persisted in multivariable analyses.
Compared with children in English-primary-language households, children in non-English-primary-language households experienced multiple disparities in medical and oral health, access to care, and use of services.
The authors apply sociolinguistic theories of accommodation to investigate how consumers in a minority subculture respond to the use of their ethnic language in advertising. Specifically, Hispanic consumers' responses to the varying degrees of Spanish-language usage in print advertising were examined. It was found that the effects of Spanish usage in advertising can be usefully explained by accommodation theory. Spanish-language advertising increased Hispanic consumers' perception of advertiser sensitivity to Hispanic culture and people, and this perception in turn enhanced affect toward the advertisements. Yet, after controlling for perceived advertiser sensitivity, it was also found that advertising exclusively in Spanish decreased affect toward the advertisement. This finding may be interpreted to mean that though Spanish-language advertising appears to signal solidarity with the Hispanic community, exclusive use of Spanish in advertising may arouse Hispanic insecurities about language usage. Implications for future research and theory on language choice and usage in communication to consumer subcultures are discussed.
Experiments to evaluate questionnaires or methods for data collection are often conducted in the context of a probability sample that collects data from various primary sampling units or sites. Statistics used to evaluate treatment effects for these experiments have different interpretations and variances in different inferential frameworks. We discuss four frameworks for inference about treatment effects: inference to the finite population, to a superpopulation of future sites, to the mean of the site treatment effects and to individual respondents. For each framework, we consider the parameters of interest, the properties of statistics used to estimate those parameters, and the optimal design for the experiment. We consider the four inferential frameworks for an experiment conducted on a mail survey measuring criminal victimization and community attitudes towards law enforcement. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the frameworks could be applied to other experiments.
This article evaluates methods to improve response rates from Spanish speakers in two-phase mail surveys of the U.S. population. Many surveys are subject to nonresponse bias and under-represent the 20 percent of households that speak a language other than English at home. In the United States, Spanish speakers comprise 60 percent of the persons who speak some language other than English at home. A set of language treatment experiments was designed to improve response rates from Spanish speakers, and these were implemented in the 2011 National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES) Field Test. The language experiments included treatments that varied the languages used in the materials (both English and Spanish, or English only), whether the materials in both languages were mailed in all mailings or just in the follow-up, the way the instruments presented the language alternatives, and whether the language efforts were targeted at certain addresses or sent to all households. The findings show that sending survey materials to all sampled households in both languages substantially increased participation from Spanish-speaking households and did not jeopardize responses from monolingual English households.
ABSTRACT According to the results from the Census 2000 SupplementarySurvey (C2SS), the foreign born population grew by57 percent since 1990 and approximately45 million people aged five years and older spoke a language other than English at home. Currently , there is little research investigating differences in dataquality between English and non-English speaking households in the American Community Survey(ACS). To better understand if differences exist, this paper reportsresults from quantitative assessments of datacollecte d from English and non-English speaking households in the ACS. This research addresses key questions about whetherexisting methods,are resulting in the collection of incomplete data in theACS due to language barriers. The ACS is a new household surveythat is being designed to produce timelydemographic,
The idea for this book was born from our contact with colleagues and from finding in the scientific literature that important issues were being addressed by researchers with a methodology so faulty that it rendered the results uninterpretable or misleading. We hoped that by compiling in one place the experiences of various researchers in conducting studies with Hispanics, future investigators would be able to address properly the methodological limitations that have plagued so much of the early writings on Hispanics.
In writing this book we have tried to include the experiences and suggestions of a large number of authors who have conducted research with Hispanics in the last few years. In some cases we have emphasized one solution over the other possibilities based on our experiences over the last few years in which we have studied well over 14,000 Hispanics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Web surveys appear to be attaining lower response rates than equivalent mail surveys. One reason may be that there is currently little information on effective strategies for increasing response to Internet-based surveys. Web users are becoming more impatient with high-burden Web interactions. The authors examined the decision to respond to a Web survey by embedding a series of experiments in a survey of students at the University of Michigan. A sample of over 4,500 students was sent an e-mail invitation to participate in a Web survey on affirmative action policies. Methodological experiments included using a progress indicator, automating password entry, varying the timing of reminder notices to nonrespondents, and using a prenotification report of the anticipated survey length. Each of these experiments was designed to vary the burden (perceived or real) of the survey request. Results of these experiments are presented.
Real-time interpretation during a survey can expand the number of languages in which surveys are offered. There are questions,
however, about the quality of the interpretation process given that the interview is typically not pretranslated. A detailed
assessment of the quality of this approach is provided using behavior-coding of interviews conducted with respondents who
otherwise would have been finalized as “language barrier nonrespondents.” Interviews were recorded and behavior-coded, quantifying
for each question, (1) the accuracy of the interpretation of the question, (2) the accuracy of the interpreted response, (3)
the degree of difficulty administering the question, (4) the number of times the question needed to be repeated, and (5) the
number of times the interpreter and respondent engaged in dialogue that was not relayed to the interviewer. The approach produced
favorable results, with less than a 4 percent error rate for interpretation of the questions and a 1.4 percent error rate
in interpretation of survey responses.
We report results from two statewide experiments in Washington designed to test potential methods for using postal mail to obtain survey responses over the Internet from address-based samples of general public households. The five methods we test are: 1) sending Web and mail modes of response sequentially; 2) providing a prepaid $5 incentive; 3) offering an instruction card for responding over the Web; 4) sending the follow-up request by Priority Mail; and 5) providing an additional $5 incentive with this follow-up request. Results are evaluated from the standpoint of response rates, demographic representativeness of respondents, and survey costs and data collection times for Web and mail modes. We find that a Web-plus-mail design - mailing an initial Web request followed by a mail request - with the prepaid incentive offers much potential for obtaining Internet responses. In addition, the mail follow-up to the initial Web request significantly increases overall response rates and improves respondent
We sought to determine how often non-English-speaking (NES) persons are excluded from medical research. DESIGN. Self-administered survey.
A Medline search identified all original investigations on provider-patient relations published in major U.S. journals from 1989 through 1991, whose methodologies involved direct interaction between researcher and subject (N = 216). Each study's corresponding author was surveyed; 81% responded.
Of the 172 respondents, 22% included NES persons; among these includers, 16% had not considered the issue during the study design process, and 32% thought including the NES had affected their study results. Among the 40% who excluded the NES (excluders), the most common reason was not having thought of the issue (51%), followed by translation issues and recruitment of bilingual staff. The remaining 35% (others) indicated that there were no NES persons in their study areas.
NES persons are commonly excluded from provider-patient communication studies appearing in influential journals, potentially limiting the generalizability of study findings. Because they are often excluded through overnight, heightened awareness among researchers and granting institutions, along with the development of valid instruments in varied languages, may increase representation of non-English-speaking subjects in research.
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