Cross-National Comparative Studies in Social Sciences: Methodology, History of Development, State of the Art and Recent Trends

Abstract

Anna Andreenkova — Vice Director, Institute for Comparative Social Research, Head of the European Social Survey in Russia. Address: 20, Bolshaya Dmitrovka St., Moscow, 107031, Russian Federation. E-mail: anna.andreenkova@cessi.ru

Cross-national comparative social surveys help to address key academic and practical purposes. They test the universality of social theories; form the empirical basis for new explanatory models and theories; measure the effectiveness of macro-social government and international social programs; and study public opinion on global politics and global issues. Comparative surveys are also of high public importance because they allow each society to look at itself from the outside, understand similarities and differences of certain nations, and analyze and forecast the direction and speed of development of a particular society in different aspects of its social life.

We suggest a definition of cross-national comparative social survey as an empirical project based on mass survey data (general population or large sub-group of population) and designed with the primary purpose of comparing two or more social units (countries, nations, cultures) with particular criteria at some given moment in time. Cross-national comparative surveys sprouted in the post-war years of the last century, when organizational infrastructure and a necessary level of methodological knowledge became available. This was also when public need for such surveys grew rapidly in order to solve the tasks of constructing new relations between nations in peace time, recovering and broadening international cooperation, and the formation of international organizations.

The first comparative social surveys were initiated by American scholars (Cantril, Almond, S. Verba, N. Nai, et al.), however, the center later shifted to European countries. After the mid 1960s, the Soviet Union took part in several cross-national comparative surveys e.g., ‘International comparative survey of time budgets’, ‘Automatization and industrial workers’. Later, in the 1970s, they initiated some comparative projects in Eastern Europe (among them such surveys as ‘Impact of higher education on supporting and developing social structures of socialists societies’, ‘Convergence of working class and engineering-technical intelligentsia of socialist countries’, ‘Life course of youth in socialists societies’). At the end of the 1980s, the Department of Methodological Research (headed by V. Andreenkov) at the Institute of Sociology (USSR Academy of Sciences) became the centre of methodological development and there was a gradual introduction of this new research method in Russia — mass surveys with face-to-face or personal interviews on randomly selected samples. Russia initiated and participated in different comparative surveys (on public opinion of foreign policy issues, relations between countries and global issues), but also large cross-national trend comparative academic surveys (World Value Survey, in particular). Currently, Russia is a member of all large-scale trend comparative social surveys such as the European Social Survey (ESS), ISSP and the World Value Survey. They are also part of many other regional and global comparative projects.

One of the basic features of cross-national comparative surveys is their multi-contextual content and design. In addition to three main methodological challenges for mass surveys — sample design and construction, measurement and coverage issues — comparative surveys hold one more methodological challenge — the need for equivalency in the data, i.e. a comparability problem. A high level of comparability can be obtained only if surveys are equivalent at least to some degree on few basic parameters — conceptual, linguistic (translation), sampling, data collection mode and performance, data processing and documentation.

In the last two decades, comparative surveys have grown in the number of included units (countries) and now employ more complicated survey design — not only cross-national, but also cross-sectional or longitudinal. Another trend is the increase of understanding and the implementation of equivalency principles at different stages of the survey — not only on conceptual and instrument design, but also in sampling, data processing and presentation, and the inclusion of international and interdisciplinary efforts and expertise at all stages of the project. Comparative surveys are moving toward the introduction of more democratic methods in the organization of the projects (from financing to conceptual design); higher standards of data quality; new approaches to questionnaire design for different national and cultural contexts; inclusion of the translations in the questionnaire design stage; broader usages and more requirements for probability random samples; more complicated approaches to data collection modes (from single mode to mix-modes); more attention paid to and the improvement of the quality of documentation; more attention to transparency of survey at all stages — from the generation of ideas and theoretical background, to all details of data collection and more democratic data access; and establishing cross-national survey infrastructure.