The rise of cross-national survey data harmonization in the social sciences: emergence of an interdisciplinary methodological field

Dubrow, Joshua Kjerulf; Tomescu-Dubrow, Irina

doi:10.1007/s11135-015-0215-z

Cited by 37 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…In making country comparisons based on survey data, one of the key challenges is to ensure equivalence in what is measured by a certain item in different countries (e.g. Burkhauser and Lillard 2005; Dubrow and Tomescu-Dubrow 2016). However, focus group standardization provides additional challenges: not only do the question items need to be understood the same by participants in different countries but the selection criteria and moderating style also need to be similar across countries in order to produce comparable data.…”

Section: Focus Groups As a Cross-national Research Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

A methodology for cross-national comparative focus group research: illustrations from discussions about political protest

et al. 2019

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We propose a methodology for comparative cross-national focus group research and illustrate how this methodology is useful for advancing our understanding of political protest. Focus group research allows researchers to study the collective process of meaning making and formation of intersubjective attitudes. This process has been shown to be relevant for how people discuss politics, and how in turn it could influence participation in politics. However, a systematic methodology for examining the influence of the historical, social, and political context in different countries has not been developed hitherto. In order to allow for comparisons between the formation of attitudes in different countries, we put forward several methodological decisions aimed at achieving standardization in cross-national focus group research design. Group composition, recruitment strategies, and moderation style are the key facets of focus group research that need to be standardized in order to make meaningful cross-national comparisons, but more practical considerations in implementing focus groups cross-nationally are also discussed. We illustrate and critically assess the proposed methodology based on data from an international comparative research project in which 80 focus groups were conducted in nine different countries in Europe and Latin America.

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Section: Focus Groups As a Cross-national Research Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

A methodology for cross-national comparative focus group research: illustrations from discussions about political protest

et al. 2019

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“…It was only a decade later that these survey programs started to improve their reach in other geographical areas, but even leaving aside persisting gaps in Asian and African data, two problems remain: (1) harmonization of different waves of the same survey or of different surveys is a problematic process. 119 In this sense, increasing the time horizon or extending the observation to a larger group of countries typically comes at the cost of a considerable decrease of comparable variables; (2) and, more importantly, ll questionnaires of large survey programs remain theoretically informed by secularization thesis and keep struggling with contemporary religious and non-religious landscapes. 59 While the field of data harmonization is a rapidly expanding sector significantly improving the quality of newly collected data, new surveys, such as Understanding Unbelief, 69 the Secular Voices Survey, 85 or the Secular Communities Survey 86 tackle the latter issue.…”

Section: Text Analyticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How can big data shape the field of non-religion studies? And why does it matter?

2021

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The shift of attention from the decline of organized religion to the rise of post-Christian spiritualities, anti-religious positions, secularity, and religious indifference has coincided with the deconstruction of the binary distinction between ''religion'' and ''non-religion''-initiated by spirituality studies throughout the 1980s and recently resumed by the emerging field of non-religion studies. The current state of cross-national surveys makes it difficult to address the new theoretical concerns due to (1) lack of theoretically relevant variables, (2) lack of longitudinal data to track historical changes in non-religious positions, and (3) difficulties in accessing small and/or hardly reachable sub-populations of religious nones. We explore how user profiling, text analytics, automatic image classification, and various research designs based on the integration of survey methods and big data can address these issues as well as shape non-religion studies, promote its institutionalization, stimulate interdisciplinary cooperation, and improve the understanding of non-religion by redefining current methodological practices. ll

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“…This approach represents common practice and is considered reasonably valid when question wordings and response categories are similar (Veenhoven 1993 harmonization enables us to extend the cross-national coverage of survey data, which is often limited to specific groups of countries (e.g., regionally), and therefore increases variation and facilitates cross-national comparison (Dubrow and Tomescu-Dubrow 2016). Common challenges to ex-post harmonization include the quality of the source data and documentation and the comparability of the data (Granda et al 2010; Tomescu-Dubrow and Slomczynski 2016).…”

Section: Footnote 1 (Continued) 3 Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral integrity matters: how electoral process conditions the relationship between political losing and political trust

Mauk

2020

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This contribution adds a new perspective to the debate on electoral integrity by asking how electoral integrity affects the way in which election results translate into citizen attitudes towards the political system. It introduces a causal mechanism that links political losing to political trust via evaluations of electoral fairness: citizens who voted for the losing camp are more likely to view the electoral process as unfair than citizens who voted for the winning camp, resulting in political distrust. It further suggests that the effects of political losing on political trust depend on the level of electoral integrity. In conditions where the elections were conducted in a free and fair manner, even those who voted for the losing camp have little reason to suspect foul play and therefore political losing should barely affect perceptions of the electoral process. Whenever there are actual indications of electoral malpractice, however, political losers have much more reason to doubt the integrity of the electoral process than those who are content with the outcome of the election. The contribution makes use of a unique dataset that ex-post harmonizes survey data from three cross-national survey projects (Asian Barometer Survey, European Social Survey, Latinobarómetro) and macro-level data from the Varieties-of-Democracy Project to cover 45 democracies in Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Using multi-level modeling, it finds that political losing indeed decreases political trust indirectly via perceptions of electoral fairness. Confirming its key proposition, the empirical analysis shows that political losing has a weaker effect on political trust in countries where electoral integrity is high.

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The rise of cross-national survey data harmonization in the social sciences: emergence of an interdisciplinary methodological field

Cited by 37 publications

References 20 publications

A methodology for cross-national comparative focus group research: illustrations from discussions about political protest

A methodology for cross-national comparative focus group research: illustrations from discussions about political protest

How can big data shape the field of non-religion studies? And why does it matter?

Electoral integrity matters: how electoral process conditions the relationship between political losing and political trust

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