Is there language discrimination in not providing questionnaires and consent forms in the language of the respondents?
I know of several large-scale studies where a small number of minorities are included in the study. Because the research instrument is developed only in English, by design non-English speaking persons are excluded, either because they will simply refuse to be interviewed or because the interviewer would consider them as an “ineligible” person. If the study was planned to exclude these non-English-speaking populations, then such exclusion constitutes neither bias nor discrimination. On the other hand, if the study was designed to include them, then the lack of a non-English-language version of the study questionnaire constitutes “sloppy” science. But this is generally not seen as a discrimination issue. An important issue related to your question is the ethics of obtaining consent in a population with limited education which happens to be also non-English-speaking. I have had the experience of doing surveys with such populations. We always prepared different translations of the instrume
