Commensuration and its Discontents: Adapting the MQPL Across Contexts, Worldviews, Languages, and Cultures

• In Event: Comparative and Cross-National Comparisons in Policing and Corrections

Abstract

The Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL) survey, developed by Liebling (2004) to assess the “moral quality,” culture, values, and social environment of individual prisons, has been used by researchers across the world. When leveraged in the context of a study of the French prison system, however, researchers noticed a puzzling trend: the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was bafflingly low for many of the survey dimensions. Why did the French translation of the MQPL yield such low alpha values? And what could have been done to better adapt the instrument to a different culture, language, worldview, and prison regime? This paper aims to provide a framework for prisons researchers seeking to adapt a survey instrument to a new socio-cultural context. It proposes a framework to recontextualize adaptations of the MQPL, by identifying four categories of problems that emerge in the process of adapting a tool to new contexts, worldviews, economic settings, and more. These problems are identified as linguistic, measurement, contextual and worldview differences. By structuring the types of problems that may arise in the process of adapting an instrument to different contexts, we hope to alleviate some of commensuration’s ‘discontents’ for future cross-cultural penological researchers.

Authors

• May Pascaud, John Jay College of Criminal Justice / CUNY Graduate Center

• Lila Kazemian, John Jay College of Criminal Justice