Conducting cross-national and cross-cultural surveys: papers from the 2005 meeting of the international workshop on Comparative Survey Design and Implementation (CSDI)

Abstract

"The papers in this volume stem from the third annual meeting of the InternationalWorkshop on Comparative Survey Design and Implementation (CSDI). Initiated in 2002, the Workshop developed out of cross-cultural symposia held at ZUMA throughout thenineteen nineties. One of CSDI's primary goals is to promote research intomethodological issues of particular and sometimes unique salience for cross-cultural andcross-national survey research. The seven papers are good illustrations of the broad spectrum of research fields in whichCSDI researchers are engaged. The volume begins and ends with two framework papers,the first discussing what makes cross-national research special, the last on where we beginto draw boundaries between entities to be compared in 'comparative' research. The fiveremaining papers discuss (in order of the volume): the rich information available from themultinational European Social Survey on data collection; socio-demographic measurementand comparability in the cross-national context, again with reference to the EuropeanSocial Survey; cognitive pre-testing of translated questionnaires; communicativeissues across cultures in telephone interviews; and preliminary work on guidelines onusing interpreters underway at the U.S. Census Bureau. The last-mentioned papers reflectresearch concerns in U.S. cross-cultural context." (author's abstract). Contents: Peter Lynn, Lilli Japec, Lars Lyberg: What's so special about cross-national surveys? (7-20); Achim Koch, Michael Blohm: Fieldwork details in the European Social Survey 2002/2003 (21-52); Uwe Warner, Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik: Discussion of the income measure in the European Social Survey: a proposal of revised survey questions about the "total net household income" (53-66); Patricia L. Goerman: An examination of pretesting methods for multicultural, multilingual surveys: the use of cognitive interviews to test Spanish instruments (67-80); Brian Kleiner, Yuling Pan: Cross-cultural communication and the telephone survey interview (81-90); Yuling Pan: The use of interpreters in the conduct of household surveys: development of U.S. Census Bureau interpretation guidelines (91-100); John MacInnes: Category and comparison across what kind of frontier? (101-114).