Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Excluding non-English speaking households from telephone surveys can result in biased estimates. For many national surveys, the addition of a single language such as Spanish has been sufficient to reduce this bias. But what happens when a study is designed to produce state-level estimates? This presentation will describe a methodology developed for data collection in multiple languages as part of the recently completed State and Local Area Integrated Telephone Survey (SLAITS) National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs (NS-CSHCN).

The NS-CSHCN was designed to produce, for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, state-level prevalence estimates of children with special health care needs, describe the types of services that they need and use, assess shortcomings in the system of care for special needs children, and produce estimates of health care coverage for all children. To minimize potential error, a methodology was developed to identify and field cases in Korean, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, Cantonese, Polish, French, Tagalog, and Italian, as well as in English and Spanish.

Beginning with choosing languages for interview and ending with final data file production, this presentation will describe the procedures developed to ensure that quality data were collected in each of the ten languages: identification of languages needed, accurate and culturally-sensitive questionnaire translation, targeted recruitment and training of interviewers fluent in each language, sample management, and monitoring the quality of interviews conducted in languages other than English and Spanish. Response rates by language and the distribution of completed interviews by state will also be reported.