(Study 2a) Assessing the Japanese Adaptation of the Beliefs About Being Alone Scale: A Review of the Rodriguez et al. (2025) Translation

The present study aims to empirically examine the linguistic validity of the Japanese version of the Beliefs About Being Alone (BABA) scale, originally presented by Rodriguez et al. (2025, Nature Communications). While rigorous back-translation is essential for ensuring measurement equivalence in cross-cultural research, subtle linguistic nuances can sometimes be lost. Although Rodriguez et al. (2025, Study 4) employed back-translation procedures, certain expressions in their Japanese version may benefit from further refinement to better align with contemporary native usage. If unaddressed, such linguistic discrepancies could potentially increase cognitive load for respondents or affect the scale's construct validity. In Study 2a, we examine whether the following finding from the original paper can be replicated: “ Japanese have more positive beliefs about being alone than Americans.” Some items in the translated scale are not semantically equivalent to the original. For example, “bad–good” was translated as “worst–best,” and “lonely–connected” was translated as “lonely – Even when I’m alone, I don’t feel lonely because I’m connected to other people.” Therefore, although the original scale may yield results similar to those reported in Rodriguez et al. (2025, Study 4), the re-translated scale may fail to reproduce their findings. In Study 2a, we will collect Japanese data by having participants complete either the original or the re-translated version of the BABA scale.