The Origins and Implications of Language Effects in Multilingual Surveys: A MIMIC Approach with Application to Latino Political Attitudes

The study of Latino public opinion has renewed interest in the relationship between language and survey response. However, extant research generally relies on statistical methods that cannot distinguish between two related yet distinct types of language effects in Latino surveys: (1) differences in attitude and (2) differences in measures of attitude. The former reflects varied levels of a latent attitude between English and Spanish interviewees. The latter—formally known as Differential Item Functioning (DIF)—refers to linguistic differences in the interpretation of survey items, which lead Latino respondents to misreport their level of attitude. This paper proposes Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes models to decouple these two types of language effects. Using this modeling framework, I examine language differences in measures of subjective and factual political attitudes from the Latino National Survey (2006). I find that the language of interview systematically colors Latinos’ interpretation of survey items, even after controlling for measurement error and individual differences in the latent variable being assessed. I then show through an applied analysis how ignoring language DIF can yield misleading inferences about hypothesized relationships between variables. Together, these findings highlight a need for greater theoretical work on the psychological origins of language effects in multilingual political surveys.