Designing Surveys for Multilingual Populations - Part 2. An Interview with Rubén Ángel Arias Rueda

In this episode of Total Survey Design, Dr. Azdren Coma sits down with Dr. Rubén Ángel Arias Rueda, Project Manager and Lead Researcher at Washington State University's Social and Economic Sciences Research Center, for the second part of a two-part series on multilingual surveys. Dr. Arias Rueda specializes in mixed-methods equity research, bilingual data collection, and community-engaged fieldwork, and has led statewide qualitative and survey studies for Washington State agencies and commissions—including research on opportunity gaps for Hispanic and Latino students and on agricultural labor conditions. Before joining the SESRC, he spent 15 years teaching Spanish and Spanish literature at all levels of the curriculum.

The conversation explores Rubén's approach to designing surveys that work in both English and Spanish, beginning with the core goal that guides his bilingual instruments. He weighs in on whether tools like Google Translate and generative AI are sufficient for translating a survey into a second language, and discusses the strengths and limits of back-translation as a quality check. From there, the discussion turns to the practical challenges of designing and administering multilingual surveys in the field, the methodological questions involved in combining data across language versions, and the considerations researchers should keep in mind when interpreting results from multilingual samples.

The episode closes with Rubén's broader advice for researchers and practitioners taking on multilingual survey work, drawing on lessons from his experience of bilingual data collection with Spanish-speaking communities across Washington State.