Quantitative Methods in the
Social Sciences 2

Cross-national comparisons

Cross-national comparative analysis is increasingly important for understanding particularities, communalities, and change in European societies and for testing theories in the fields of sociology, political science, and (social) psychology. A growing number of datasets (three waves of ESS, several waves of EVS, ISSP, WVS) designed to provide comparability over most European countries, open new opportunities for substantive and methodological research – but also raise challenges.

Cross-national surveys face all the methodological problems of national surveys, but then multiplied by the number of nations that are studied (Almond and Verba, 1970). This is not a problem if surveys are treated and analysed independently, but raises interesting issues when researchers treat the surveys as comparable and concentrate on comparisons across nations. One methodological advantage of cross-national surveys is that many of the problems that are ignored in single nation surveys must now be faced explicitly (Almond & Verba, 1970). This is especially so when the focus of comparative research is on attitudes, and on social characteristics of individuals. These constructs are related to theoretical concepts (theoretical validity) that are measured by sets of observed indicators. These indicators may be both subjective states, e.g. opinions, or social background variables, e.g. level of education, social status, religious involvement. While the problem of comparability arises in each stage of a study, this group will focus on the analysis of survey data and will cover the following topics:

- the selection of comparable observed indicators for measuring concepts that are equivalent over nations, and that cover the intended concepts;

- aspects of data quality control, and dealing with measurement error in attitudinal variables in comparative settings;

- building theory-based empirical models;

- approaches to comparative data analysis (conditions for multi-group comparisons and how to do it, discovering clusters of countries and groups within countries, hierarchical models, and the introduction of relevant contextual variables).

Core members

Leader

Jaak Billiet, sociological methodology – CeSO Leuven (organiser)                                      

Members

Eldad Davidov, methodology & sociology - University of Zurich

Henryck Domanski, sociology – Polish Academy of Sciences                                 

Adrian Dusa (Romanian Social Data Archive, University of Bucharest)

Sylvia Kritzinger – University of Vienna                                        

Karen Phalet, cross cultural psychology (K.U. Leuven)                                            

Anu Realo (University of Tartu)

Willem Saris, methodology -  ESADE (Barcelona)

Peer Scheepers, methodology (Raboud University, Nijmegen)                                

Peter Schmidt, political science and statistics (University of Giesen)                       

Fons Van de Vijver, cross-cultural psychology (Tilburg University)