THE TYPOLOGY OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE RESEARCH AND KEY METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

One can distinguish between the sociological comparative research depending on whether they aim to explain international (macro-macro relationships) or intra-national differentation (macro - micro). Based on this distinction, the typology has been made which takes into account various kind of characterictics of the countries as well as number of countries. The typology allows to fi gure out many problems related to functional equivalence in the comparative research. In particular, the analysis of the three kinds of the functional equivalence was made - namely that of: the units of observation (subject equivalence), indicators and constructs (measurement equivalence), as well as the stage of observed facts (processual - temporal equivalence). Key words: types of cross-national studies; equivalency of observation units; functional equivalency of variables

Systems of Distribution and a Sense of Equity: A Multilevel Analysis of Meritocratic Attitudes in Post-industrial Societies

Meritocratic attitudes are defined as general beliefs that education and its correlates should determine personal economic outcomes. Using the International Social Survey Project (ISSP): Social Inequality Module (1992), we examine both individual-level and country-level determinants of pro-meritocratic attitudes. According to self-interest and rational-action theories, individuals with high educational attainment and high personal income are expected to have strong meritocratic beliefs because meritocracy is in their best interest—they would gain under such a system. At the same time, both modernization and post-industrial theories imply that persons living in countries with a high degree of societal meritocracy hold stronger meritocratic beliefs than persons living in countries with low degree of societal meritocracy. Results of the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis on a data set including 7,972 persons from 14 countries indicate that the impact of individuals’ education and income on meritocratic attitudes occurred as theoretically predicted. We also demonstrate that the relationship between the degree of societal meritocracy and the degree of support for such a system is statistically significant even if national wealth and educational stock (as well as individual-level variables) are controlled. In addition, we discovered that at the beginning of the 1990s a post-communist regime had a negative effect on support for meritocracy

Supplementary materials - The Large Number of Duplicate Records in International Survey Projects: The Need for Data Quality Control

These materials provide detailed information about our findings and allow researchers to replicate analyses presented in the paper

Papers on duplicate records

Papers on duplicate records

SDR 1.0 Master Box

SDR 1.0 Master Box is an outcome of the project "Democratic Values and Protest Behavior: Data Harmonization, Measurement Comparability, and Multi-Level Modeling in Cross-National Perspective". It consists of five data files and corresponding documentation: (1) the master file (MASTER) with individual-level data from cross-national surveys, (2) country-level file (PLUG-COUNTRY), (3) country-year-level file (PLUG-COUNTRY-YEAR), (4) survey-level file (PLUG-SURVEY), and (5) wave-level file (PLUG-WAVE). The MASTER file is the core of the Master Box and contains harmonized target variables, harmonization control variables, as well as flags for non-unique records, non-unique case IDs, and missing case IDs, while the other PLUG files containing contextual data, metadata, and data quality indicators. 2018/08/22 We have identified some errors in the SDR 1.0 data. For specific information see https://dataharmonization.org/data/sdr-data-alerts/.</p

SQRQuerier: A Visual Querying Framework for Cross-national Survey Data Recycling

Public opinion surveys constitute a powerful tool to study peoples' attitudes and behaviors in comparative perspectives. However, even worldwide surveys provide only partial geographic and time coverage, which hinders comprehensive knowledge production. To broaden the scope of comparison, social scientists turn to ex-post harmonization of variables from datasets that cover similar topics but in different populations and/or years. The resulting new datasets can be analyzed as a single source, which can be flexibly accessed through many data portals. However, such portals offer little guidance to explore the data in-depth or query data with user-customized needs. As a result, it is still challenging for social scientists to efficiently identify related data for their studies and evaluate their theoretical models based on the sliced data. To overcome them, in the Survey Data Recycling (SDR) international cooperation research project, we propose SDRQuerier and apply it to the harmonized SDR database, which features over two million respondents interviewed in a total of 1,721 national surveys that are part of 22 well-known international projects. We design the SDRQuerier to solve three practical challenges that social scientists routinely face. First, a BERT-based model provides customized data queries through research questions or keywords. Second, we propose a new visual design to showcase the availability of the harmonized data at different levels, thus helping users decide if empirical data exist to address a given research question. Lastly, SDRQuerier discloses the underlying relational patterns among substantive and methodological variables in the database, to help social scientists rigorously evaluate or even improve their regression models. Through case studies with multiple social scientists in solving their daily challenges, we demonstrated the novelty, effectiveness of SDRQuerier