CULTURAL FRAME SWITCHING OF RESPONSE STYLES AS A FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL VALUES

As the discourse in society shifts to include previously marginalized perspectives, it is imperative that the forms of assessing and characterizing individuals from diverse backgrounds be re-evaluated as well. Research on response styles has raised concern over the interpretation of test and survey results of diverse groups. The aim of the present study was to further investigate response styles rather than perpetuate the practice of eliminating them. Consistent with dynamic constructivism, the culture-carrier-context (CCC) model and cultural frame switching (CFS), the present study examines the role that cultural values play in explaining the mechanism through which language influences responding. This study sampled 87 Mexican American bicultural bilingual undergraduate students. Participants completed five subscales of the Latino/Anglo Cultural Value Scales (LCVS) that assess the Latinx cultural values of familismo, simpatía/respeto, gender roles, power distance, and allocentrism. Participants were randomly assigned to the English (or Spanish) language condition at Time 1 and the Spanish (or English) language condition at Time 2. Results suggest that overall, participants engage in greater ARS and ERS on Spanish-language questionnaires compared to English-language questionnaires. Simpatía was also found to mediate the language-ARS association. As expected, participants more strongly endorsed the cultural values of simpatía and allocentrism when responding to Spanish-language questionnaires compared to English-language questionnaires. Contrary to expectations, participants were also found to endorse less power distance in Spanish than in English. Study implications and future research are discussed.