Cross-cultural survey equivalence

Abstract

"This volume, the third in the ZUMA-Nachrichten-Spezial series on methodological issues in empirical social science research, is devoted to issues of cross-cultural methodology. The focus is on issues of equivalence, the key requirement in cross-national and cross-cultural comparative research. As the contributions indicate, equivalence is, however, better thought of in terms of equivalencies - in social science surveys and in other standardised instruments of measurement. Contributors come from different countries and continents and from widely differing research backgrounds, ranging from linguistics to survey research and its methodologies, to cultural anthropology and cross-cultural psychology." (author's abstract). Contents: Timothy P. Johnson: Approaches to equivalence in cross-cultural and cross-national survey research (1-40); Fons J.R. van de Vijver: Towards a theory of bias and equivalence (41-65); Willem E. Saris: The effects of measurement error in cross-cultural research (67-84); Janet A. Harkness, Alicia Schoua-Glusberg: Questionnaires in translation (87-126); Michael Braun, Jacqueline Scott: Multidimensional scaling and equivalence: is having a job the same as working? (129-144); Ingwer Borg: A facet-theoretical approach to item equivalency (145-158); Peter Ph. Mohler, Tom W. Smith, Janet A. Harkness: Respondents' ratings of expressions from response scales: a two-country, two-language investigation on equivalence and translation (159-184).