Translating Measures Posted on November 26, 2007 Jodi M. Gonzalez (bio) discusses the attempt to develop a bilingual measure for bipolar disorder.

It is so difficult to get a study that is bilingual, that can include both populations. I think other places do it well, but it can be quite challenging from a financial perspective and just not having the data there.

We translated an instrument for a bipolar center that Dr. Bowden has, Charles Bowden, into Spanish and then we back translated it into English; and so we did the work of doing that. And we were going to do validation studies, which is comparing our Spanish version to other Spanish versions of bipolar instruments and there aren’t any. There are some from Spain that had been validated in Spain. The Young Mania and MADRAS the were what we used in the English version of this validation study.

So now we just hit a barrier. We can’t validate an instrument with other instruments, because there haven’t been other instruments validated that we’ve found, at least the ones we wanted to use. So now we’re stuck; what should we do, what’s our next steps?

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