The ITC Granada conference highlights collaborations with professionals for improving validity when making national and international comparisons and decisions based on test scores, particularly, those decisions that aim to improve equity, inclusion, and fairness for individuals, groups, and societies. Collaboration also means bridging the gaps between disciplines with common interests (e.g., psychometric and survey research), overcoming the “methods divide” (e.g., qualitative vs. quantitative methods), and connecting academic and work contexts. To take advantage of emerging methodologies in assessment and changes in tests and questionnaire administration modes (e.g., online assessments, computational methods), also requires professionals with diverse backgrounds to work together.
Thematic line 1: Challenges and solutions for translation
Two decades ago, testing in multiple languages was a balancing act between linguistic equivalence and fluency in the target languages. It was, and still is, a considerable challenge to produce test adaptations that are valid and reliable across different cultures. It takes sophisticated team translation designs to adapt tests and mitigate differences related to language (or culture) when these differences are not relevant to the construct being measured. Has technology reshuffled the cards? Are we better equipped today? State of the art neural machine translation (NMT) and adaptive machine translation produce impressive results, which are predictions about the correct translation that do not carry certainty. Do new advances in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) potentially drive progress in cross-lingual testing?
The proposed conference theme aims to explore the challenges, difficulties, and opportunities involved in adapting evaluation instruments to minority languages and cultures. Minority languages, spoken by a small portion of the population in a particular region, country, or territory, may face various difficulties such as discrimination, marginalization, lack of resources, and cultural assimilation. Although broad principles and recommendations exist for the cross-cultural adaptation of evaluation instruments, developing more specific and nuanced guidelines that consider the unique linguistic and cultural characteristics of minority populations presents a significant challenge. In addition, adapting evaluation instruments to minority languages and cultures requires careful consideration of cultural factors that influence psychological constructs, such as beliefs, values, and norms.
The importance of culturally adapted tests to improve the validity and reliability of psychological assessments, reduce the risk of cultural bias, and ensure that psychological services are accessible and effective for diverse populations. The conference will also address the specific difficulties associated with adapting instruments to minority languages and cultures, such as ensuring overlap between constructs definition in different cultures, lack of resources, and lack of interest from publishers and journals. The advancements of new technologies may represent an opportunity to improve the adaptation process. Overall, this theme aims to encourage dialogue and collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to address the challenges, difficulties, and opportunities of adapting evaluation instruments to minority languages and cultures.
The thematic line intends to bridge the gap between survey research and psychometrics. Professionals in both fields can benefit from innovations in questionnaire design, traditional and new pre-testing methods, administration modes, translation methods, validation methods, AI challenges, etc. Despite differences in the contexts in which professionals in both fields work, and differences in the social and political demands to which they must respond, strengthening collaborations can make a difference in how we contribute to improving inferential quality and political decision making
It is hard to anticipate all topics of interest for professionals involved in cross-cultural testing, psychological assessment, and survey when working on improving validity in the broadest meaning of the word. Nevertheless, the list of topics and thematic lines should be considered as the main arguments of the scientific program of the 2024 ITC conference.
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