The Aesthetic Pleasure in Design Scale for Spanish Speaking Countries: A Method for the Cross-Cultural Implementation and Adaptation of Psychometric Scales

摘要

One of the main issues in the field of product aesthetics is the lack of consistency in the instruments and terms being used to assess it. Several scales have been used but with restricted validity and reliability; notwithstanding, the APID (Aesthetic Pleasure In Design) scale developed in English, as part of the UMA (Unified Model of Aesthetics) project, lacks these limitations. Our research, being in a Spanish speaking country, required the scale to be in Spanish to be comprised and applied to domestic respondents. The adaptation of psychometric instruments with conceptual and linguistic challenging constructs, often is difficult, as the items used to assess the construct do not always have a direct translation. Also, it is possible for the adapted version to require different items that were not considered in the original instrument in order to preserve the content's equivalence according to the target culture. A qualitative-quantitative mixed approach is proposed in order to overcome these issues. The resulting instrument has been statistically tested, proving to be both valid and reliable for the measurement of aesthetic pleasure in design. The final scale consists of five items: bonito, hermoso, agradable, llamativo and me gusta. This paper aims to improve the understanding of how aesthetic pleasure is perceived and therefore expressed by the local respondents gaining insight into how this construct is mentally represented and categorized by the respondents. It also aims to illustrate how psychometric scales based on respondents' vocabulary have a great potential as usability assessment instruments.