ScaleRep: Providing a Multilingual Answer Scale Repository to the Cross-cultural Research Community

• Applicant: Dr. Dorothée Behr
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 563642886

GESIS proposes the establishment of a FAIR Repository for Multilingual Answer Scales (ScaleRep). This repository will include typically re-occurring answer scales in questionnaires (agreement, importance, satisfaction, likelihood, etc.) in their original language and their vetted translations in a multitude of languages, to be replicated in many studies regardless of (social science) discipline. The scales will be enriched with meta information on the answer scales, such as information on measurement properties (bipolar/unipolar, modifier or not; extreme end point or not) and quality status. CApStAn – Linguistic Quality Control – a key player in the cross-cultural and cross-national community across disciplines, will be the major data donor to this repository thanks to their extensive linguistic expertise and their involvement in many key studies in the cross-cultural field. The repository will be built for the cross-cultural research community in a multitude of disciplines, and it is planned to be further enriched by the cross-cultural community, since a feature allowing community contributions will be integrated (e.g., additions of further translations, reports of scale validations or calibrations, comments on existing entries). This is the first-of-its-kind endeavor to share high-quality answer scale translations across communities and thus increase quality in cross-cultural research. Striving for continued excellence, the repository will also feature experimental guidelines to support external researchers to empirically test the equivalence of answer scales and to feed back this information into the repository.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Participating Institution: GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
• Co-Investigators: Oliver Hopt; Professorin Dr. Beatrice Rammstedt