Efrén O. Pérez

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.

Implicit attitudes: meaning, measurement, and synergy with political science

The last quarter-century has witnessed an intellectual revolution in social psychology. Scholars in that field have increasingly come around to the notion that people possess attitudes that are nonverbalized, spontaneously activated, difficult to control, and that can sometimes operate without one’s awareness (e.g. Fazio et al. 1986; 1995; Bargh, Chen, and Ambady 1996; Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998; Payne et al. 2005). These implicit attitudes are often assessed with indirect measures, which – rather than asking people to self-report an attitude – time people’s performance in milliseconds on a series of sorting exercises (more on this to follow). These indirect measures have yielded several lessons, but two stand out: People vary in their degree of implicit attitudes, and these individual differences predict people’s judgments and behavior, often independently of explicit attitudes (i.e. self-reported attitudes) (Greenwald et al. 2009). These insights have spurred many psychologists to reconsider what is meant by thinking, with some currently viewing human cognition as being underpinned by two interrelated forms of reasoning. The first is characterized by deliberation and is responsible for explicit attitudes. The second is embodied by impulsiveness and is accountable for implicit attitudes (e.g. Strack and Deutsch 2004; Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2006; Rydell and McConnell 2006). Given these developments, one would think implicit attitudes have been enthusiastically welcomed by political science, which often draws extensively on psychological concepts and tools. Yet one would be wrong. Our discipline continues to generally view attitudes as evaluations expressed through self-reports. To be sure, some political science scholarship uses insights and methods from implicit cognition (e.g. Malhotra, Margalit, and Mo 2013; Albertson 2011; Pérez 2010; Pasek et al. 2009; Craemer 2008; Arcuri et al. 2008; Kam 2007; Burdein, Lodge, and Taber 2006). But these threads of research have not yet produced a rich tapestry of theory and evidence like other areas of our discipline that vigorously engage psychological research, including the study of heuristics (e.g. Popkin 1991), emotions (e.g. Brader 2006), and personality (e.g. Mondak et al. 2010). Indeed, as Huddy and Feldman (2009, 437) lament: “To date, there are relatively few published studies that report the political effects of implicit attitudes, making it difficult to assess their current payoff for political scientists.” This situation is somewhat understandable. New ideas, especially if imported from another discipline, are likely to meet some resistance. But, on another level, political science’s tepid response to implicit attitudes is puzzling. Social psychology and political science have long enjoyed an “intellectual affair” (McGuire 1993, 9). Yet the two are oddly estranged on the idea of implicit attitudes. My goal in this review article is to help mend this rift by explaining what

Implicit Attitudes in Public Opinion

Implicit attitudes are automatic evaluations of objects: political candidates and parties, racial and ethnic groups, national symbols and consumer products, and so on. These responses are spontaneously triggered hard to control and can operate subconsciously. Implicit attitudes stand in contradistinction to their explicit variety: self-reported attitudes that people actively direct, control, and are conscious of. Public-opinion scholars have overwhelmingly centered on explicit attitudes, painting a portrait of mass opinion formation as slow, deliberative, and often dispassionate. But psychological research since the late 1970s has agglomerated into the view that much of people’s thinking is fast, automatic, and affectively charged—in a word, implicit. Heaped onto all this is the critical insight that implicit attitudes precede, and many times structure, their explicit counterparts. The implications for the study of public opinion are manifold. This article brings some order to all this by familiarizing readers with the conceptualization, measurement, and analysis of implicit attitudes in American public opinion.