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Which policies should the European Union (EU) regulate? Which issues should national governments regulate? This is a crucial issue within the EU. Citizens in EU member states have had little influence on decisions allocating political decision-making powers between the supranational and the national/regional levels. Given this situation, it is important to study the supranationalism of people in different European countries. The issues addressed here are the following: - How can one determine the supranationalism of European citizens? - Is the homogeneity of these opinions such that one scale can be used for the whole of Europe? Data used are obtained from the first round of the European Social Survey. The paper reports on an effort to develop a cumulative (Mokken) scale of supranationalism. The paper concludes that one unique scale does not exist that is applicable to all European countries; however, different cumulative scales can be constructed for four clusters of countries. Finally, cross cultural comparisons are carried out testing different hypotheses relating the level of supranationalism with political trust, age, education and establishment in the area.

"Which policies should the European Union (EU) regulate? Which issues should national governments regulate? This is a crucial issue within the EU. Citizens in EU member states have had little influence on decisions allocating political decision-making powers between the supranational and the national/ regional levels. Given this situation, it is important to study the supranationalism of people in different European countries. The issues addressed here are the following: - How can one determine the supranationalism of European citizens? - Is the homogeneity of these opinions such that one scale can be used for the whole of Europe? Data used are obtained from the first round of the European Social Survey. The paper reports on an effort to develop a cumulative (Mokken) scale of supranationalism. The paper concludes that one unique scale does not exist that is applicable to all European countries; however, different cumulative scales can be constructed for four clusters of countries. Finally, cross cultural comparisons are carried out testing different hypotheses relating the level of supranationalism with political trust, age, education and establishment in the area." (author's abstract)

"This paper addresses the question if it is meaningful to group basic values from the values model of Schwartz, which is a vital component of the European Social Survey (ESS), and presents an alternative approach. The suggestion to group values is raised in several studies led by Eldad Davidov, which more precisely conclude that only four of the original ten values can be studied as such (Hedonism, Stimulation, Self-direction, and Security), whereas the remaining six values have to be grouped in three pairs in order to solve the problem of a lack of discriminant validity. This paper indicates that the grouping was necessary because of the choice strategy of items for the ESS. The items chosen for the different values are chosen in such a way that the correlation within the value is relatively low and sometimes the correlations with items of other values is higher. The authors show this in three steps: the first one based on a German-study, looking for the correlation between the values in the original Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). Secondly, the ESS selection from this wider set of items is used to show that this choice leads to much higher correlations between the values. Thirdly, an analysis with an alternative choice from the same PVQ set of items is done to show that this high correlation is not necessary. In this way we show that the high correlation between the values in the ESS is due to the selection of the items in the ESS and is not intrinsic to the values studied." (author's abstract)

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Contributors -- Introduction -- PART I: A Synoptic Perspective -- CHAPTER 1: Different Judgment Models for Policy Questions: Competing or Complementary? -- CHAPTER 2: Separation of Error, Method Effects, Instability, and Attitude Strength -- PART II: The Problem of Ambivalence -- CHAPTER 3: Good, Bad, and Ambivalent: The Consequences of Multidimensional Political Attitudes -- CHAPTER 4: The Not-So-Ambivalent Public: Policy Attitudes in the Political Culture of Ambivalence -- PART III: Politics and Nonattitudes -- CHAPTER 5: The Structure of Political Argument and the Logic of Issue -- CHAPTER 6: Floating Voters in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1948-2000 -- PART IV: Attitude Strength and Attitude Stability -- CHAPTER 7: Importance, Knowledge, and Accessibility: Exploring the Dimensionality of Strength-Related Attitude Properties -- CHAPTER 8: Stability and Change of Opinion: The Case of Swiss Policy against Pollution Caused by Cars -- CHAPTER 9: Attitude Strength and Response Stability of a Quasi-Balanced Political Alienation Scale in a Panel Study -- PART V: An Alternative to the Standard Opinion Poll -- CHAPTER 10: Coping with the Nonattitudes Phenomenon: A Survey Research Approach -- CHAPTER 11: The Influence of Information on Considered Opinions: The Example of the Choice Questionnaire -- PART VI: Looking Forward -- CHAPTER 12: A Consistency Theory of Public Opinion and Political Choice: The Hypothesis of Menu Dependence -- Index

"When designing questionnaires, many choices have to be made. Because the consequences of these choices for the quality of the questions are largely unknown, it has often been said that designing a questionnaire is an art. To make it a more scientific activity we need to know more about the consequences of these choices. In order to further such an approach we have: 1. made an inventory of the choices to be made when designing survey questions and created a code book to transform these question characteristics into the independent variables for explaining quality of survey questions; 2. assembled a large set of studies that use multi-trait multi-method experiments to estimate the reliability and validity of questions; 3. carried out a meta-analysis that relates these question characteristics to the reliability and validity estimates of the questions. On the basis of the results of these efforts the authors have constructed a database. This data base contains at present 1023 measurement instruments based on 87 experiments conducted on random samples from sometimes regional but mostly national samples of 300 to 2000 respondents. The database contains information on studies of reliability and validity of survey questions formulated in three different languages: English, German and Dutch. The purpose of this study was to generate cross national generalizations of the findings published so far drawn from national studies. This analysis provides a quantitative estimate of the effects of the different choices on the reliability, validity and the method effects." (author's abstract)

"Häufig untersucht man, welchen Einfluss die Formulierung von Fragen auf Antworten hat, während das Problem der Übersetzung von Begriffen in Fragen kaum erörtert wird. In dieser Studie wollen wir uns mit der Übertragung von Konstrukten in Fragen befassen. Durch die Operationalisierung von Konstrukten kann angegeben werden, auf welche intuitiven Begriffe sie sich beziehen. Danach kann anhand der intuitiven Begriffe festgestellt werden, welche Fragen in Betracht kommen. Intuitive Begriffe beziehen sich auf kognitive Überzeugungen, Evaluationen, evaluative Überzeugungen, affektive Bewertungen, Präferenzen, Werte, Normen, Verhalten, Handhungstendenzen und dergleichen. Um den Zusammenhang zwischen den intuitiven Konzepten und ihrer sprachlichen Formulierung in den Items zu verdeutlichen, werden die Strukturen von Behauptungen analysiert. Wenn man die Begriffe mit der Frageform verknüpft, erhält man ein Verfahren zur systematischen Klassifizierung von Fragen, das sich auch eignet, um Fehler in Fragen zu entdecken, wodurch man eine erhebliche Verbesserung der Qualität der Fragen erzielen kann." (Autorenreferat)

Inspired by the research of Frank Andrews on the reliability and validity of survey questions, a large-scale research project was conducted in the Netherlands. The project was comprised of two different stages. For this project, more than 600 survey questions were included in different surveys according to a multitrait-multimethod design. The resulting data were analyzed in two steps. In the first step, estimates of validity and reliability were obtained for each question. The second step was a meta-analysis of the variation in data quality found in the first step. This variation was related to question-specific characteristics, response scale characteristics, context characteristics, and design characteristics. The article describes how the results of this study can be of practical use. In addition, the authors compare them to results of similar studies in the United States, Austria, and other Western, Central, and Eastern European countries.

In the February 1987 issue of Sociological Methods and Research several articles were published that dealt with the same data set. These data focused on attitudes toward guest workers. The purpose of that study was to demonstrate the application of measurement models, especially with respect to random measurement error, on large-scale survey data. Since we think that such studies are very valuable, we want to continue the discussion on measurement models by applying alternative models to the same data. We show that quite different models fit the same data set and that these models lead to quite different interpretations. In doing so we will use some tests that we think should be applied in order to differentiate between measurement or true score models and factor analysis models. In this article we show that the resulting models and interpretations of the data can vary quite a lot depending on whether one uses a true score model or a factor model. The substantive result of these analyses is that it seems possible to distinguish two types of opinions. One type we have called the first reaction, and the other type is called a more seriously considered opinion. These two opinions differ systematically from each other and therefore the results of research using the one or the other opinion will also differ.