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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/14/00
Time: 12:08:39 PM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.51
Hi Judy,
Thanks for the positive comments. I will pass them on to the rest of the authors.
You mentioned two very important issues with respect to what we are trying to do in the IPATS initiative. The first one is translation. We have tried (but failed I am sure in many cases) to include material that is pretty much straightforward and relatively unambiguous. For example, we asked respondents to rate the degree to which they would be concerned if various relatives, friends, or associates stuttered, were mentally ill, etc. rather than to interpret a statement like, "Women who stutter should not try to order a meal in a restaurant." One cannot avoid cultural bias but the latter statement would create all kinds of problems of interpretation and translation in societies or subcultures where women would rarely go to restaurants much less order. The other thing we have done in the two instances where we have translated the POSHA-E (Bulgarian and Spanish) is back-translate the new version to English again. For example, in one case, "my younger child's teacher" (meaning any young child) was translated as "the teacher of my youngest child." The differences are subtle but important. But not as different as Bobbie Lubker's favorite story where a translation to Russion of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" came back as "The vodka is ready but the beef is not strong."
The second issue you mention is the assumption that some of the attributes would be positive, neutral, or negative. That is precisely my answer. We ASSUMED that "old" would be more negative than positive. We will have to wait for the data to tell us if we were right or wrong. But we tried to anchor the most negative with "mental illness" and the most positive with "intelligent" and select others that might well vary from culture to culture. So far, our assumptions have been fairly well supported. But surprisingly, it looks like respondents' general impressions and degree to which they want to be is often the lowest for "overweight" in several of the seven or eight samples we have looked at to date. And, as seen in this paper, "stuttering" is just about as negative as "mental illness."
In any case, we wanted to see how stuttering stacks up in the list within any culture. What we assumed is really not important so long as we get a range of responses in order to "place" or "anchor" stuttering within that hierarchy.
If that is not clear, I can try again.
Ken