Levels of respondent cooperation may be affected by factors specific to different cultures, and some situations may need to be handled differently depending on the group being approached. For instance, in some surveys, such as HIV/AIDS studies, sensitive or invasive questions often need to be asked before or at the beginning of the interview process to determine eligibility for the survey. In such cases, the cultural context may dictate whether respondent-recruiting and screening activities can be conducted in an open manner or should be kept clandestine. Asking some cultural subgroups about their sexual preferences or HIV status may be very different when conducting a full-length health or sexual behavior survey as compared to a short screener instrument. The level of cooperation can be limited by fear of reprisals or the lack of, or uncertainty about, confidentiality and privacy assurances. In countries where the level of risk behaviors or disease infection rates is high, the target population can become fatigued or reluctant to participate in surveys as the result of being overstudied. On the other hand, response can be overwhelmingly participatory, perhaps from habits of compliance left over from past regimes, as in some former dictatorships where cooperation in government-run projects was mandatory.

Other problems that have not been widely addressed in the literature are often encountered in developing questionnaires for multicultural surveys. Researchers designing instruments “from scratch” for use in cultures not their own face difficulties when an instrument already administered in one cultural setting is required to provide comparable measurements in another. Or an instrument might need to be designed for use across different cultures, either in a single survey or in multiple independent surveys.

Multicultural survey research becomes even more challenging where special circumstances, such as hazardous locations or difficult topics of research, add another layer of complexity to an already complicated task.

Researchers planning and conducting surveys in war-torn or impoverished areas have safety and logistical issues to contend with. For example, in a study on mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, researcher Gilbert Burnham and his colleagues found they could not replicate a sampling strategy they had used only two years before, involving the use of global positioning system devices, because their lives might be endangered by being seen with the GPS units. They were forced to adopt a suboptimal but less risky sampling strategy. Human rights research is severely hampered when existing information systems to aid data collection are slow, overloaded, and chaotic because of human rights emergencies.

These extraordinary surveys will have all of the multicultural problems we have outlined, and others as well. Beyond taking whatever steps are feasible to mitigate the impact of unfavorable circumstances, researchers have a particular obligation to note (and quantify, if possible) factors beyond their control that might affect results, acknowledging the survey’s limitations in their methodological reports even when their impact cannot be precisely known.