ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

Survey research involving multilingual, culturally diverse, Indigenous, migrant, and other underrepresented populations presents challenges that extend well beyond translating questionnaires. Constructs developed within dominant cultural and linguistic contexts may not carry equivalent meanings across communities. Conventional approaches to sampling, recruitment, question design, and administration can also exclude participants or reproduce inequities, affecting both data quality and the conclusions drawn from survey findings.

This session invites methodological, empirical, and conceptual contributions that advance inclusive and culturally responsive approaches to survey research. Of particular interest are studies addressing multilingual and cross-cultural questionnaire development; participatory and community-engaged survey design; recruitment and retention of hard-to-reach populations; accessibility for participants with varied literacy, language, cognitive, or digital needs; and the integration of qualitative methods with surveys to strengthen interpretation and contextual understanding.

Contributions may examine co-design with communities, culturally grounded construct development, translation and adaptation processes, cognitive interviewing, mixed-mode administration, nonresponse, small or underrepresented samples, and ethical approaches to collecting sensitive demographic or identity information. The session also welcomes critical examinations of AI-assisted translation, questionnaire development, pretesting, and analysis. Such tools may improve efficiency and accessibility, but they can also obscure cultural meanings, reproduce linguistic bias, or marginalize forms of knowledge inadequately represented in training data.

Finally, the session will consider how inclusion affects measurement validity, participation, representativeness, interpretation, and data governance. Its central premise is that inclusive survey design is not simply an ethical consideration: it is fundamental to producing credible evidence. The session aims to identify transferable principles and practical strategies for integrating technological innovation with community knowledge, cultural responsiveness, and established standards of survey quality.