Page 116 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Werner Wirth and Steffen Kolb

be rather small, while cultural or ethnic differences among groups
within some specific states or countries can be substantial. Neverthe-
less, the (methodologically) typical case for a comparison between
countries is a comparison between different cultures and language
areas.
Cooperation among researchers with different cultural research back-
grounds (usually publishing in different languages) poses specific prob-
lems (van Deth 1998). For a linguistic adaptation of the theoretical back-
ground as well as for the instruments, one can discriminate between
“more etic” and “more emic” approaches, too:

(1) Translation-oriented approaches: Most of the translation-based
procedures produce two translated versions of the text: one in
the “foreign” language and one after translation back into the
original language. The latter version can be compared to the orig-
inal version to evaluate the translation. In general, this is repeated
until a complete match of the two versions is obtained (Sperber
et al. 1994, 503; van de Vijver and Tanzer 1997, 267; Erkut et al.
1999, 208–10 – all based on Werner and Campbell 1970). Sperber,
Devellis, and Boehlecke (1994) even introduce bilingual special-
ists to validate the instrument. Lauf and Peter (2001) discuss
these problems with a special focus on reliability of multilingual
codebooks for content analyses.
This method produces eticly formed instruments due to the
focus on “linguistic equivalence,” which can only work as a cri-
terion of evaluation whenever functional equivalence has been
established on every superior level. The constructs have to be
measurable by the same wording in all the countries. Van de
Vijver and Tanzer (1997, 267) call this procedure the application
of an instrument in another language. However, there are “more
emic” orientations based on translation (e.g., Usunier 1999). In
a cultural adaptation, cultural singularities can be included if,
for example, culture-specific connotations are counterbalanced
bya different item-formulation. Purely emic approaches develop
entirely culture-specific instruments. Consequently, these instru-
ments cannot be produced by translation. This alternative, called
assembly (van de Vijver and Tanzer 1997, 267), is seen as a “silver
bullet,” for example, by Greenfield (1996, 311–17), as the process
of communication during the complete phase of data collection
could be culturally adapted. However, the problems concerning

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