Suchergebnisse

Attention is drawn to the danger of false conclusions resulting from comparisons of the marginals obtained in PO surveys in diff countries in general, since there are specific cultural variations in the readiness to admit lack of knowledge or opinion about the subject of the question. Data are drawn from a cross-nat'l survey sponsored by the European Coordination Center for Res & Documentation in Soc Sci's, Vienna, in 1964 & 1965, published under the title 'Images of a Disarmed World.' It is found that the Norwegians are clearly much more inclined to give wrong answers rather than admit ignorance, than are the Frenchmen or the Poles, irrespective of the question asked. The Frenchmen & the Poles both show a tendency to give the 'don't know' response. 2 conclusions are deduced from this: (1) The % of correct responses given by the Norwegian public may appear unduly high when compared with the French & the Polish samples. Some Norwegian R's who did not know the correct answers probably increased the number of 'hits' using the heads-tails method, instead of admitting their ignorance. (2) The same response style may be operative not only on knowledge questions but on opinion questions as well. To the extent that this is true, comparisons of opinion marginals among the 3 countries will also be distorted. It is observed that diff countries have diff response styles & that the diff's may be even greater in countries whose cultures differ more widely. In the case of extreme diff's in response styles, it might be advisable to abandon comparisons of marginals for the whole pop in favor of an analysis of responses of comparable groups. 2 Tables. M. Maxfield.

Das Kernproblem internationaler Querschnittstudien ist das Problem der Vergleichbarkeit. Hier setzt der Beitrag an. Nachdem einleitend Beispiele für international vergleichende Forschungsprojekte vorgestellt worden sind, behandelt der Beitrag typische Aspekte des Forschungsdesigns bei Querschnittstudien, Fragen der Planung und Organisation der Datengewinnung, den Einfluss unterschiedlicher nationaler Rahmenbedingungen, die Bedeutung kultureller Faktoren, Aspekte der Standardisierung, die Umsetzung des Forschungsdesigns sowie Datenanalyse und Berichterstattung über die Ergebnisse. Die Verfasser betonen abschließend die Notwendigkeit, sich über die idealen Designeigenschaften international vergleichender Untersuchungen klar zu werden, den Einfluss dieser Eigenschaften auf die Forschungsergebnisse zu kennen und Grundlagen eines stabil und vorhersehbar ablaufenden Forschungsprozesses zu schaffen. (ICE)

This contribution deals with measurement instruments - that is, questionnaires and individual items - employed in international survey research. By international surveys we mean cross-national comparative studies whose concept, implementation, and organisation are shaped by the comparability requirement. We begin by focussing on general aspects of the comparability of international surveys. In the case of problems that occur in all surveys - for example sampling-related problems and nonresponse - we refer the reader to the corresponding thematic contributions in the Survey Guidelines and to the literature. We make a distinction between ensuring the comparability of measurement instruments ex-ante and ex-post - that is, before or after the actual survey is, or has been, conducted. Comparability is established ex ante by means of pretests, for example; it is established ex post within the framework of the data analysis or additional studies. We focus in particular on question translation.

Comparable household income measures are crucial for most social science analyses of cross-national public opinion survey data. However, income questions in many cross-national surveys suffer from comparability and interpretability limitations that have not been adequately addressed by the existing literature. In this article, we examine the income measure in one major survey, the World Values Survey (WVS), arguing that a variety of problems arise when drawing inferences—descriptive or causal, individual or aggregate—using the standard ten-category measure. We then propose and implement a number of corrections to these potential biases and present a series of diagnostics that confirm the importance of our proposed corrections. We conclude by documenting some of the same challenges in the income measures used in other cross-national surveys. The accompanying data set can be merged with the WVS to make better use of the income measure.

The dataset is related to the paper "Explaining Inconsistencies in the Education Distributions of Ten Cross-National Surveys – The Role of Methodological Survey Characteristics" (Ortmanns, 2020). The paper compares the education distributions referring to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED variable) of nine cross-national surveys with the European Union Labour Force Survey, which is used as a benchmark. The paper identifies large inconsistencies in the education distribution across surveys and therefore, it examines how methodological survey characteristics may explain these inconsistencies. The paper refers to the Total Survey Error framework (TSE) and analyses survey characteristics relating to different kinds of errors. This dataset includes the education distribution and 15 survey characteristics of ten cross-national surveys.

Reports of party membership have documented steep declines in formal enrollment in many countries, but numbers alone tell us little about the systemic causes or likely implications of such drops. Existing cross-national surveys can help illuminate the extent and consequences of these changes. Unfortunately, they are difficult to use for this purpose because differences in question wording and institutional differences in the meaning of party membership produce unstable results. This paper proposes to overcome these obstacles by using behavioral measures of party membership in survey-based studies of party membership. We demonstrate that such measures produce results which are more consistent across surveys and therefore more meaningful. We then illustrate their utility by using a behaviorally-qualified measure to study how party membership decline has affected parties' ability to mobilize grassroots partisan participation. Our analysis also shows that even though reported party membership declined from the 1990s to the 2000s, there was surprisingly little change in this decade in the number of politically active partisans.

Abstract
Cross-national surveys run the risk of differential survey errors, where data collected vary in quality from country to country. Responsive and adaptive survey designs (RASDs) have been proposed as a way to reduce survey errors, by leveraging auxiliary variables to inform fieldwork efforts, but have rarely been considered in the context of cross-national surveys. Using data from the European Social Survey, we simulate fieldwork in a repeated cross-national survey using RASD where fieldwork efforts are ended early for selected units in the final stage of data collection. Demographic variables, paradata (interviewer observations), and contact data are used to inform fieldwork efforts. Eight combinations of response propensity models and selection mechanisms are evaluated in terms of sample composition (as measured by the coefficient of variation of response propensities), response rates, number of contact attempts saved, and effects on estimates of target variables in the survey. We find that sample balance can be improved in many country-round combinations. Response rates can be increased marginally and targeting high propensity respondents could lead to significant cost savings associated with making fewer contact attempts. Estimates of target variables are not changed by the case prioritizations used in the simulations, indicating that they do not impact nonresponse bias. We conclude that RASDs should be considered in cross-national surveys, but that more work is needed to identify suitable covariates to inform fieldwork efforts.

"Achieving a representative sample is an important goal for every survey. High response rates are often referred to as an indicator of representativeness in survey methodology research. However, a low response rate does not necessarily imply low representativeness, so that alternative ways of assessing representativeness are needed in times where low response rates are almost ubiquitous. This study asks whether education, a socio-demographic variable covered by virtually every survey of individuals, is a good variable for assessing the representativeness of a realised survey sample. We examine this issue in two steps: Firstly, the distributions of the harmonised education variable in six official and academic cross-national surveys by country-year combination are compared with the respective education distributions in a high-quality reference dataset. Doing so, we identify many substantial inconsistencies. Secondly, we try to identify the sources of these inconsistencies, looking at both measurement errors in the education variables and errors of representation. Since in most instances, inconsistent measurement procedures can probably explain the observed inconsistencies, we conclude that the education variable as currently measured in cross-national surveys is, without further processing, unsuitable for assessing sample representativeness, and constructing nonresponse weights. The paper closes with recommendations for achieving a more comparable measurement of the education variable." (author's abstract)

"The significance of cross-national surveys for the social sciences has increased over the past decades and with it the number of cross-national datasets that researchers have access to. Cross-national surveys are typically large enterprises that demand dedicated efforts to coordinate the process of data collection in the participating countries. While cross-national surveys have addressed many important methodological problems, such as translation and the cultural applicability of concepts, the management of the data collection process has yet had little place in cross-national survey methodology. This paper describes the quality standards for data collection and their monitoring in the European Social Survey (ESS). In the ESS data are collected via face-to-face interviewing. In each country a different survey organisation carries out the data collection. Assuring the quality across the large number of survey organisations is a complex but indispensable task to achieve valid and comparable data." (author's abstract)