Adapting a psychological instrument on the “hard-to-survey” population: the case of poor people in Russia

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of adapting the instrument on a “hard-to-survey” sample (poor people). The adaptation consisted of three stages: (1) the translation of scales that have not been previously adapted on a Russian sample, (2) cognitive interviews with people living in poverty, (3) adjusting the questionnaire based on the results of cognitive interviews. We used translation — back translation, as well as committee approach, to translate the scales. Cognitive interviews were conducted using a concurrent probing approach with both scripted and spontaneous probes. In the conclusion, we present the results of reliability analysis and equivalence of measures across the poor (N=162) and non-poor (N=188) samples. Finally, we formulate recommendations for researchers dealing with “hard-to-survey” samples among the poor.