The Problem of Metaphorical Nonequivalence in Cross-Cultural Survey Research
- 1 September 1993
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
- Vol. 24 (3) , 344-365
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022193243005
Abstract
The use of questionnaire data to compare the mental health of Hmong refugee and general population high school students demonstrates the difficulty of translating between investigator and subject lexicons and, consequently, of equating the conceptual systems they signify. Whether particular psychosocial variables that are standardized for a general population can be used to study the adjustment of linguistically unassimilated ethnic minorities depends on the nature of the semantic discontinuities that exist between the source and target languages. Metaphorical nonequivalence significantly affected the responses of a subset of Hmong subjects to English survey items.Keywords
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