AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
World values survey codebook4/7/2023 ![]() ![]() Without such testing, both descriptive cross-national comparisons and inferential multilevel and aggregate-level analyses (e.g., regressions), which use non-invariant attitudinal measurements as inputs, are at constant risk of obtaining the biased 2 estimates of the target quantities of interest (e.g., mean rankings or regression coefficients). Measurement equivalence, or measurement invariance 1 (MI, in short), cannot generally be taken for granted and needs to be tested empirically. When asking people living in different cultural, religious, linguistic, and political contexts about complex and abstract concepts, often of Western origins and not deeply rooted in local cultures, it is always possible to confuse meaningful information from the recorded responses with a good deal of measurement noise (e.g., stemming from translation errors, nation-specific response styles or social desirability biases, or substantively nonequivalent meanings attributed by respondents to seemingly the same concepts: van Deth, 2009 Davidov et al., 2014), which may finally result in, according to a popular metaphor, comparing “apples with oranges” (e.g., Stegmueller, 2011). However, as it was acknowledged by leading comparative researchers as early as in the 1960s ( Przeworski and Teune, 1966), to ensure meaningful comparisons of attitudes and opinions across groups (most notably countries), the measures of those attitudes and opinions should function equivalently across all compared groups (i.e., countries) to provide comparable numerical scores. Insights from comparative survey data laid the foundation for a number of influential theories in political science, such as Almond and Verba’s (1963) civic culture theory, Putnam’s (1993 2000) social capital theory, Norris’s (1999 2011) critical citizen theory, or Inglehart and Welzel’s ( Inglehart, 1977 Inglehart, 1990 Inglehart and Welzel, 2005) revised theory of modernization and its reformulation as a theory of emancipation by Welzel (2013)-to name just a few of the most renowned contributions. These survey projects also enable scholars to thoroughly track changes in public opinion and prevalent political values region- or even worldwide and relate those changes to various political developments, e.g., democratization ( Inglehart and Welzel 2005 Inglehart and Welzel 2010). Evidence from such surveys can be used to compare how people living in different countries think about a diverse range of social and political issues and explore what their attitudes, opinions, and values have in common and where those are differing. ![]() Instead, their comparability can be tied to their correlations with theoretically relevant external variables.Ĭomparativists increasingly use data from large cross-national surveys, such as the World Values Survey (WVS), the European Social Survey (ESS), the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), and dozens of others, sometimes covering as much as 100 countries, representing up to 90% of the global population (as the WVS does). These alternative measures, known as formative measures, do not assume strong correlations between their indicators, for which reason it is inappropriate to test their comparability using the reflective MGCFA approach. Finally, this study emphasizes that some survey-based constructs, e.g., authoritarian notions of democracy, do not follow the reflective (correlation-based) logic of construct development. These analyses show that both measures can be considered reliable comparative measures of democratic attitudes, although for different reasons. It then provides an empirical illustration of the key concepts and methods from the MGCFA-MI literature by applying them to testing for MI of two recently introduced measures of democracy attitudes, so-called liberal and authoritarian notions of democracy, across 60 countries in the sixth round of the World Values Survey. It reviews 1) the conceptual foundations of MI 2) standard procedures of testing for MI in practical applications within the multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) paradigm and 3) two novel approaches to MI, Bayesian approximate measurement invariance, and MGCFA alignment optimization, which are especially suitable for dealing with extremely heterogeneous data from large-scale comparative surveys typical for modern political science. This article offers a gentle introduction to the measurement invariance (MI) literature with a focus on its relevance to comparative political research. Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, Higher School of Economics, St. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |