Designing and collecting internationally comparative data

The Pursuit of Equivalence in Cross-National Surveys
Roger Jowell, City University, Director of the European Social Survey

This will review some of the obstacles to equivalence, including cultural differences, different methodological habits, the influence of media opinion poll methods and the dominance of economic indicators, and will ask: is appropriate rigour possible?

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Input Harmonisation and Output Harmonisation

Jonathan Gershuny, ISER, University of Essex

Is input harmonisation really possible in a multinational comparative context? An attempt at complete specification of instrument and procedures prior to fieldwork may still produce substantial non-equivalence. Conversely, variation in some aspects of survey procedures may sometimes be corrected subsequently. This presentation uses illustrations from the Harmonised European Time Use Study and the Multinational Time Use Study.

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Discussion

Obtaining comparative international measures in health

Mel Bartley, University College London

Epidemiology concerns itself classically with "Time, Place and Person", and epidemiologists have for some time used international comparative studies to develop hypotheses about the causation of disease. This presentation will highlight some of the problems that must be considered before assuming that measures of potentialcausal factors or even of diseases are in fact comparable between national contexts.

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Cross-National Media Research: Coding Issues

Thomas König, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University

RMP Project page

Depending on its theoretical framework, international comparative media research requires different strategies for the development of empirical indicators. Research designs for institutionalist and economic approaches are easier translated across national and linguistic boundaries than those for cultural studies. We will illustrate these differential problems comparing the transposition of coding schemes for three studies on:

• the effects of newspaper market concentrations in the UK and Finland
• newspaper reporting on the UN Iraqi Weapons' Report in the UK, US, and Germany
• Europeanization tendencies in the public sphere of EU countries
  

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Data sources for international comparisons

Gindo Tampubolon, ESDS International

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