Is There a Single Best Way how to Word a Typical English Agree-Disagree Scale in the German Language: Results From a Survey Experiment

When translating questionnaires in a cross-national research context, response scales are among the most challenging elements. Target languages often cannot or do not reproduce important measurement properties 1-to-1 (such as unipolarity or bipolarity or distance between scale points). The effects on measurement are unknown. In this article, we compare four different German-language versions of a five-point agree-disagree (AD) scale, randomly assigned to four groups of online access panelists for a total of 15 items. Two of these AD response scales are used in the German studies of the European Social Survey (ESS) and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), respectively, and even though they are based on the same underlying English AD scale, the German versions differ in terms of scale polarity and intensity of modifiers. The other two response scales represent further existing German-language variations of a 5-point AD scale. Comparisons of frequency distributions as well as of response quality (response styles, response differentiation, response times) did not show any systematic differences between the German-language response scales, which are comforting results for the different ESS and ISSP AD wordings and their comparability to each other. Further research is warranted, however, using non-access panel respondents and their use of differently worded AD response scales.