State of Supply Chain Sustainability 2022
B. Translation and Reliability
This year, we simultaneously released our online survey instrument
in English, Spanish and Simplified Mandarin Chinese translations.
Translations of the English language survey to the two other
languages were performed by translation teams. The Spanish
language translation team consisted of Daniela Muñoz (Mexico),
Arianne Mahuad (Peru) and Anderson Bernal (Colombia). The
Mandarin translation team consisted of Jay Guo and and Daniel
Gao from the Ningbo China Center for Supply Chain Innovation
(NISCI) in Ningbo, China, part of the MIT Global Supply Chain and
Logistics Excellence (SCALE) Network.
After developing each translation, the MIT CTL research team
talked through each translated question with the translation teams,
stating and restating the translated words in order to ensure that
the correct meaning was captured. Where potential discrepancies
were encountered, native speakers were recruited to share their
insights and offer suggestions.
Once the survey data was collected, we performed another
indirect test of translation accuracy. We used a Cronbach's alpha
test to assess the internal consistency all the responses across
translations, as well as within each of the three translations
independently. Cronbach's alpha is a test of a measurement
scale's internal consistency. That is, it tests whether answers
show sufficient inter-item correlation to indicate that the tested
questions are all measuring respondents' feelings about the same
concept, or domain. Cronbach's alpha is measured on a scale of 0
to 1, and, generally speaking, scores exceeding 0.60 indicate that
the survey instrument is ‘reliable'. The results for all the questions,
as well as the three translations are shown below.6
Table 1: Reliability results for survey translations
Chronbach's Alpha
coefficient
Language
Items
Sample
units
3 Languages
108 2,932
0.656
Chinese
108
128
0.837
English
108
1,564
0.716
Spanish
108
976
0.684
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