Dialect-driven interviewer adaptation: experiences from Switzerland

There is now a small but growing body of methodological research addressing aspects of survey translation, with focus on best practices in procedures and quality control, as well as on various features of question and scale equivalence. However, beyond issues regarding scripted translations of surveys, there is little recognition in the literature that in certain linguistic contexts during orally administered surveys questions must undergo a sort of “sight translation”, where interviewers transform them ad hoc from written to spoken forms of particular dialects of languages. Our exploratory study examined the extent to which such dialect-driven interviewer adaptations may influence the ways that questions are asked, how the intended meaning of questions may be changed in the process, and how this may affect responding in the interview interaction.