Traditional and Health-Related Philanthropy: The Role of Resources and Personality

I study the relationships of resources and personality characteristics to charitable giving, postmortem organ donation, and blood donation in a nationwide sample of persons in households in the Netherlands. I find that specific personality characteristics are related to specific types of giving: agreeableness to blood donation, empathic concern to charitable giving, and prosocial value orientation to postmortem organ donation. I find that giving has a consistently stronger relation to human and social capital than to personality. Human capital increases giving; social capital increases giving only when it is approved by others. Effects of prosocial personality characteristics decline at higher levels of these characteristics. Effects of empathic concern, helpfulness, and social value orientations on generosity are mediated by verbal proficiency and church attendance.

Measurement invariance in international large-scale assessments: Integrating theory and method

This chapter reviews the basic concept of measurement invariance and its challenges with regard to international large-scale assessments (ILSAs). It examines to integrate measurement invariance evaluations with substantive insights into measurement bias. The chapter argues beyond the existing measurement invariance evaluation that a generic latent structural and measurement modeling or the simple structure of a common-factor model is unlikely to yield fully comparable scores within the contexts of ILSAs. It provides a stepwise strategy for evaluating measurement invariance with a productive way of dealing with the unattainable ideal of scalar invariance. The chapter presents an empirical example using ILSA data and discusses some general issues in evaluating measurement invariance across many groups along with considering limitations and strategies. It also presents analyses of questionnaire data and an integration of theory and method in measurement invariance evaluation within the context of ILSAs in order to evaluate the possibility of mean comparisons across countries

Implementing a Multinational Study of Questionnaire Design

This chapter explains the design of the multinational study of questionnaire design (MSQD) and the challenges faced when implementing the project across countries. It then elaborates on the sampling and online implementation of the questionnaire, as well as the questionnaire design experiments selected for the study. The aim of the MSQD was to conduct well‐cited question design experiments originally conducted in the United States and assess whether similar results would be observed decades later in the United States and in other countries. The chapter discusses challenges faced in the translation of experiments in which question wording plays a central role. The finding described in the chapter relates to the fact that the rise of online panels employing probability samples in recent years opened new avenues for researchers interested in small‐scale substantive or methodological research

Implementing a Multinational Study of Questionnaire Design

This chapter explains the design of the multinational study of questionnaire design (MSQD) and the challenges faced when implementing the project across countries. It then elaborates on the sampling and online implementation of the questionnaire, as well as the questionnaire design experiments selected for the study. The aim of the MSQD was to conduct well‐cited question design experiments originally conducted in the United States and assess whether similar results would be observed decades later in the United States and in other countries. The chapter discusses challenges faced in the translation of experiments in which question wording plays a central role. The finding described in the chapter relates to the fact that the rise of online panels employing probability samples in recent years opened new avenues for researchers interested in small‐scale substantive or methodological research