BIAS IN THE USE OF STANDARD AMERICAN NORMS WITH SPANISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE WECHSLER MEMORY SCALE-REVISED

Although most clinicians would readily agree that there is a need for Spanish translations and normative samples of major psychological test s because of the large number of individuals within the United States whose primary language is Spanish, there are in fact few well normed t ests applicable to the Spanish-speaking client in the U.S. As a result , many clinicians administer cognitive tests normed on English-speakin g American populations translated into Spanish, then interpret the tes t results using the standard American norms. The argument is generally made that such a procedure is a reasonable approximation and when cau tiously interpreted can be useful. The present study investigated the impact of this practice by using the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (WM S-R) on Spanish-speaking adults. A group of 50 normal Hispanic America ns aged 25 to 34 years were administered the WMS-R translated into Spa nish. Results showed that using English-language standard norms result ed in Spanish-speaking normal individuals getting scores an average of 1 standard deviation below ''average.'' These findings were present n ot only for verbal but for nonverbal tests as well. Based on these res ults we strongly argue against the clinical practice of using translat ions of English language tests without renorming and running new valid ity tests.