Lost in Translation? Item Validity in Bilingual Political Surveys

The dramatic increase in the U.S. Latino population in recent decades has spurred an equally dramatic rise in bilingual survey instruments used by scholars to gauge the political attitudes of this growing ethnic group. A key assumption behind these instruments is that English-language items tap the same political constructs as their Spanish-language analogs. This paper reports evidence which suggests that bilingual survey items may not always be comparable across linguistic groups. Using a variety of public opinion polls, I develop and test a series of multi-group measurement models showing that—net of measurement error—English- and Spanish-language survey items are not functionally equivalent. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the development of future bilingual surveys, both in the United States and beyond, as well as the use of extant surveys for applied analyses of Latino political attitudes.