By Suzanne Irizarry de López

While both political parties have embarked on major efforts to woo the Spanish speaking voter market, neither has taken the major step of reaching out to the Hispanic population to determine their true needs and desires as voters.

Millions of American voter views and opinions are still being typically misunderstood or discounted. Just picture a chunk of voters that equals 49% of a population larger than Canada's being ignored for its relevance and input in government affairs.

It is time to re-evaluate “the way we do market research and polling in the US”.  The notion that general market research = English language surveys, and that Hispanic research = Spanish language surveys, is a thing of the past.

Spanish is slowly asserting its place in the United States as a native and all-American language.  Spanish was the first European language spoken in the US, since the late 15^th century, particularly, in Southern and Western states, most of whose names are still in Spanish.  It is the language many Americans are and have been learning “natively” from birth, and it is an official language, next to English, in New Mexico and Puerto Rico (Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico are US natives, as the US Census  accurately defines).

Imagine the discrepancy:  On one hand, presidential candidates believe there are enough Spanish speaking voters, enough to make a difference, to spend millions in Spanish language ads.  On the other hand, pollsters poll in English…and claim the results to be representative of American voters?

The proliferation and further sophistication of Spanish TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and internet media validates and further feeds the growing co-existence of Spanish with English.  2005 was the year, where Spanish was introduced into a Senatorial inaugural speech, and, while throwing off the stenographer, was understood by more Americans than the sum of the populations of several countries put together.

Sooner than later, Spanish will pass from being associated with a foreign language option at school and an immigrant language, into being just one of the two languages most widely used in the US.  It is not for no reason that the United States is ranked number 5, in the world, among 23+ countries, for the volume of people who speak Spanish.

The traditional English-only survey method no longer represents the US American general market opinion.  Randomly selected samples do no good if interviewers can't communicate with a significant segment of that sample.  It is unacceptable to have a large segment of American Spanish speaking respondents be rudely terminated because interviewers do not know how to politely hang up the phone, or put them on hold if transferring the call to a Spanish speaker, for lack of basic Spanish phone call vocabulary.

What happens when the interviewer only speaks English and the person on the other line only speaks Spanish?  In most cases the call is terminated, labeled LB (language barrier) or put back in queue to be reassigned to a Spanish speaker.  The problem with this data gathering method is that, statistically speaking, callers will not answer the phone the second time around thereby further reducing the Hispanic sample size for the poll.  You can begin to see the weakness in referring to such survey as indicative of a 'national representative sample'.

Another typical situation is for English-only interviewers to force a Spanish dominant person to complete the survey in English.  Imagine the likelihood for the interviewer to misunderstand what the respondent expressed and, likewise, for the respondent to misinterpret what the interviewer is asking.

Utilizing all-American bilingual interviewers who are native speakers of English and native speakers of Spanish, is a way to streamline costs and efforts and capture content more accurately, and in a more realistic language-segment proportion.

Host Robert MacNeil of the PBS "Do You Speak American?" special, realized after interviewing Americans across the US, American language is always changing.  Laura Urbani wrote for the Tribune-Review:  “Spanglish, a combination of Spanish and American English; Black English, popularly known as Ebonics; [and] Chicano are dialects that have been confirmed as part of a cultural identity and recognized as a natural part of American society.”

Needless to say, you get a much higher response rate when the respondent can converse in the language of choice, even if that is Spanglish, a natural by-product of cultural fusion.  In a telephone survey situation, if the interviewers are fully fluent in both languages, a bilingual respondent has the opportunity of saying those things that have no exact translation into English, in Spanish, and vice versa.  Therefore, allowing for more accurate responses and added cultural nuance depth that would otherwise be lost in English monolingual surveys.

Interviewers are not the only ones that need to be bilingual.  The hiring staff must be fully bi-lingual. How else can the research company know their interviewers are performing and understanding truly fluently in both languages!  Furthermore, it is crucial that Spanish interviews be monitored as stringently as are English interviews.  Bilingual supervisors can monitor interviews and interviewers, as it falls, which one minute may be in English and the next minute in Spanish.

“Tapar el cielo con la mano”, a popular Spanish saying that means covering the sky with one hand, or sticking your head in the ground like an ostrich, doesn't mean reality will cease to exist.  And reality is that Spanish is a way to “speak American”, that has deep socio-historical roots in American society.