Cultural Relevance of Mental Health Scales

This chapter defines and exemplifies cultural relevance in relation to the translation of mental health scales. In addition to linguistic validity and psychometric validity, cultural is another highly influential factor that strongly impacts the achievement of an equivalent translation. Thus informed, we propose that mental health scales, cross-culturally translated and adapted ones in particular, must be relevant to the target culture, especially considering the fact that the global psychological knowledge is derived primarily from research on populations from North America and Western Europe, thereby representing merely 5% of the world’s population and neglecting the remaining 95%. Specifically, the goal of cross-culturally translating and adapting previously developed mental health instruments is to make these tools culturally valid, or specifically relevant to systems of meaning, knowledge, and action for the target cultural group and local context. To this end, the development of cross-culturally adapted scales involves a process of modifying existing measures to ensure cultural relevance, technically termed cultural grounding, or evidence-based cultural adaptation.