COMPENSACIONES Objetivo

complications aggravate this problem when a survey question has to be translated into another language for application in another culture. The problem lies in both language and culture. It may be neither possible nor desirable to find an exact literal translation for a particular word or phrase. A common word in one language may be a rare or technical word in another language. A word may have an emotive connotation in one language but not in another. To obtain equivalence in meaning it may be necessary to alter the wording. And

see Przeworski and Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry, pp. 119-130. For discussion of a practical application of a "similar approach" see Verba, Nie and Kim, Participation and Political Equality, pp. 39-40.

1

See Eugene Jacobson, Hideya Kumata and Jeanne E. Gullahorn, "Cross-Cultural Contributions to Attitude Research", Public Opinion Quarterly, 24 (1960), 218-222.

2

Verba, "The Uses of Survey Research in the Study of Comparative Politics", p. 65.

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how does the researcher know for certain when he or she has found equivalence in meaning? The same question is not likely to have a radically different status in a different culture, but it may well have a somewhat altered meaning which will present no less difficult a problem in analysis. Fortunately, as mentioned in Chapter Two, the equivalence of variables used in this study is not in serious doubt and is certainly not subject to language or cultural variation problems.

A further aspect of the problem of equivalence in cross-national research, and one that most certainly is pertinent to the study in hand, is that of the timing of fieldwork. If a researcher attempts to analyse data collected at different times in the different countries under examination it is possible that variations the researcher identifies between those nations might merely be a reflection of changing international attitudes from the time the survey was conducted in one country to the time the survey was conducted in the second country (attitudes that would also have changed in the first country by the time of the second survey), rather than significant cultural or analytic differences between the nations. Conversely, as a number of writers have noted, even if surveys are conducted simultaneously in various countries there might be particular events occurring in one "that temporarily affect political attitudes in ways

1

that are relevant to the concerns of the researcher." Thus, for "phenomena that are sensitive to situational factors and events, conducting the surveys at the same chronological point in all the countries does not equate the stimuli with the exception of one

special class - world shaking events that impinge on all the 1

countries." Ideally, the deft researcher must conduct surveys when domestic political situations are similar while also ensuring that significant international events do not intervene. In addition, Robert Alford warned that the sorts of assumptions that can legitimately be made for the analysis of a single survey within a single country cannot be made for a comparative study and so the "possibility of change over time must be examined to avoid the likelihood that a particular historical period may reflect temporary

2

forces and not a stable relationship." In this study, wherever possible, changes over time are examined, albeit on a less extensive scale than was done by Alford, partly in an attempt to control for the possibility of time periods having an arbitrary effect on the

relationships found.

Associated with the problems of equivalence are those that stem from the focus of surveys on the individual as the unit in design and analysis. The underlying assumption in the design of survey studies, that each individual within a population has the same relevance and importance as any other for the purposes of gauging opinion, is for

3

many societies not valid. The effect of employing such an assumption may be to lose the social context from some of the cultures under investigation. Of more general concern are the criticisms that survey

Herbert H. Hyman, Secondary Analysis of Sample Surveys (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1972), p. 57. See also Merritt, Systematic Approaches to Comparative Politics, p. 155; Frey, "Cross-Cultural Survey Research", pp. 193-194.

2

Alford, Party and Society, p. 65. The "assumptions" he mentioned are that variability in sampling will be minimal and that social and political conditions left unspecified will not change the general relationships that are discovered.

Scheuch, "The Cross-Cultural Use of Sample Surveys", p. 188. 3

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responses do not constitute the true attitudes and behaviour of respondents and that survey questions will not always mean the same

things to different respondents. What one respondent reveals may not

be comparable with what others reveal. These are perennial problems

in survey research. On the question of the meaning of questions to

individual respondents, this study may follow the lead of Alford, who argued that if single-nation studies are accepted as being valid then cross-national studies within a relatively homogeneous cultural block, such as the Anglo-American countries, are equally valid."' Here the focus is on an even more narrowly confined set of nations than Alford studied and from within the same cultural realm.

Harder to dismiss are the criticisms concerning the responses of

individuals. Alford suggested that the

main assumption of survey research called into question by

[its] critics is the view that survey responses represent

the attitudes and probable behavior of a single human being. If the unit of analysis is not the individual but social groups, however, these particular criticisms lose

their relevance. 2

Unfortunately this particular stance leaves the researcher vulnerable to committing what has been termed the "individual fallacy", which is

3

the reverse of the "ecological fallacy". The individual fallacy

1

Alford, Party and Society, p. 66. ^Ibid., p. 60.

3

For discussions of these terms see, for example, Erwin

K. Scheuch, "Cross-National Comparisons Using Aggregate Data: Some

Substantive and Methodological Problems", in Merritt and Rokkan (eds),

Comparing Nations, pp. 148-164; Merritt, Systematic Approaches to

Comparative Politics, pp. 14-15 (where several other such fallacies

are also reviewed); Pierce and Pride, "Cross-National

Micro-Analysis", pp. 18-19. The article which initiated the debate

surrounding these inferential fallacies was W. S. Robinson,

"Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals", American Sociological Review, 15 (1950), 351-357.

involves inferring properties of macro-level elements of a social or political system from the aggregation of individual units, which is no less potentially fallacious than are inferences about individuals within a system from knowledge of its aggregate properties. Survey respondents may be compared as groups but if the responses of the individuals who make up the groups are of dubious validity and comparability, the general properties revealed for the group (which is after all no more than an aggregation of all its constituent individuals) will likely be even less satisfactory as a description of reality. Even so-called individual-level analysis ends up relying on generalized explanations of aggregations of individuals. Methods of analysing survey data generally take the individuality out of them so that we lose the fine details of the diversity of individual responses as a cost of giving the information some manageable, coherent form. Survey data, after all, are at best only estimates of human behaviour and attitudes. Such problems will probably always plague survey research, but in the end those who want to persist with sample surveys must assume that the aggregated responses of individuals come closer to reflecting reality than many sceptics accept.

Relations between interviewers and respondents may also cause problems in comparative cross-national research. It is widely accepted that the interviewer has a "structuring" effect on responses in any interview situation, which is virtually impossible to eliminate entirely. This adds to variability between interviews and the predicament may be heightened when interviewing situations transcend not only social but also cultural strata. Some respondents may give different answers to those they would have given to identical questions asked by another interviewer. Even more will depend on the

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selection, training and skill of interviewers when researchers strive for cross-national comparability than in a single-nation survey.1 23 Various considerations related to this problem include the degree of exposure of respondents to interview techniques in other modes of their life experience; familiarity with public opinion polling generally; the level of trust in a given society, leading to the acceptance or non-acceptance of assurances of anonymity; the degree of awareness of the legitimacy of individual political opinions and so

2 o n .

Such concerns as these are linked to the final set of problems for cross-national survey research to be reviewed, those of administration. Erwin Scheuch suggested that a

critical analysis of many cross-cultural studies will show them to be methodologically less impressive than good studies done within a particular culture. This is certainly not due to the professional qualifications of those involved, since the same researchers have often done neater work in their own countries.

... the methodological and theoretical problems are greater here than in research within one country. However, no less important are ... the practical administrative and diplomatic problems involved in such research. 3

A variety of administrative problems hampers the smooth execution of cross-national surveys. Researchers cannot possibly hope to exert the

See Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, pp. 48-49 & 58-59, for a discussion of the experiences related to these concerns met in their proj e ct.

2

Of course in some cultures individual political opinions lack legitimacy which is an additional complicating factor. The list of problems connnected with interviewer-respondent relations is drawn largely from Verba, "The Uses of Survey Research in the Study of Comparative Politics", pp. 65-69.

3

Scheuch, "Cross-Cultural use of Sample Surveys", p. 203. On organizational and administrative problems see also Frey,

control over several surveys in several distant lands that they could over a single survey in their own country. They must rely on the help and good will of others - fellow academics and sometimes governments and sponsors in other nations as well. Uniformity of approach is hard to maintain under such circumstances.

Moreover financial limitations constitute a severe constraint on the organizational resources of those undertaking cross-national comparative research. While cost sounds a rather mundane consideration, it is a major hurdle for projects requiring similar and simultaneous sample surveys across several culturally disparate nations Thus, in many ways researchers who have reached the situation of trying to resolve the problems of cultural versus methodological comparability are in a comparatively felicitous position. Undoubtedly, daunting costs have been a primary cause of the dearth of

full-scale cross-national survey research projects.

Considering the formidable nature of many of the obstacles to comparative survey research described above, it is gratifying to be able to observe the advances made in more recent studies by comparison with the pioneering efforts. In all sorts of ways - organization, conceptualization, methodological rigour, analytic sophistication and so on - later studies have displayed vast improvements on earlier efforts, albeit possibly at the cost of tackling less grand questions.”* The methodological experiences and substantive findings of

See the review in William L. Miller, The Survey Method in the Social and Political Sciences (London: Frances Pinter, 1983), pp. 163-190, which gives special attention to two related projects: Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, and Verba, Nie and Kim, Participation and Political Equality.

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such cross-national, survey-based projects provide much valuable background for the present study. It is now time to discuss the data and methods used here in some detail.