Introduction

How much does the picture we obtain about a given society depend on whether we conduct interviews in one or two languages? This chapter provides a first attempt to answer this question through the analysis of the experience of the US General Social Survey (GSS) and its incorporation of Spanish as a second interviewing language.

The GSS is part of the National Data Program for the Social Sciences, a social indicators infrastructure and data-diffusion programme. Its basic purposes are three: 1) to gather data on US society in order to monitor and explain trends and constants in attitudes, behaviours and attributes and to examine the structure and functioning of society in general as well as the role of various subgroups; 2) to compare the United States to other societies to place American society in a comparative perspective and to develop crossnational models of human society; and 3) to make high-quality data easily accessible to scholars, students and others with minimal cost and waiting.

These purposes are accomplished by the regular collection and distribution of the GSS (www.gss.norc.org) and its allied surveys in the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) (www.issp.org). The GSS has conducted 27 national, in-person, full-probability samples of adults living in households in the United States between 1972 and 2008. A total of 53,034 respondents have been interviewed (Davis, Smith, & Marsden 2009).

In 2006, GSS secured support from the National Science Foundation to add Spanish to its standard, English-language version. With this expansion the GSS target population became adults living in US households and able to do an interview in either English or Spanish. According to the US Census, Hispanics were 12.5 per cent of the population in 2000 and an estimated 15.5 per cent in 2010. The Census also reports that 41 per cent of Hispanics five years of age and older do not speak English ‘very well’.

The main aim of this chapter is to show that the use of questionnaires in Spanish brought about the participation in the GSS of immigrants who could not have participated if the survey had only been conducted in English, or that, at least, would not have done so in the same way.