Bias factors in the translation of questionnaires and classification systems in international comparative child and adolescent psychiatric research.

Transcultural research also gains increasing significance in our specialized area of child and adolescent psychiatry. The contribution describes several methodical problems in connection with the translation of everyday and specialized concepts in child psychiatric studies and illustrates them with an example from an epidemiological examination. A single check of the retest reliability does not meet with the methodical requirements. Just in psychiatry it is necessary to take emotional, social, historically varying originated connotations of concepts into consideration.