579.3
Aspects of Measuring National Identity: Insights from Online-Probing
Two studies conducting cognitive interviewing could already detect problematic items in the ISSP module for Austria (see Latcheva 2009, Fleiß et al. 2009). However, these studies focused on one country and problems of cross-national comparability may not have been found.
One way to assess the existence of cross-national comparability is the application of online-probing which implements probing techniques of cognitive interviewing within web surveys. The project “Optimizing Probing Procedures for Cross-National Web Surveys” already conducted a cognitive pretest and an online pretest in Germany and will run its international survey in Germany, US, Mexico, Spain and UK in January 2014. A variety of items from the ISSP module on National identity are being analyzed. The data from the project give a unique insight into interpretation differences across respondents in a cross-national perspective.
The presentation will present results of the item battery on specific national pride which has been shown to be particularly problematic in the previous studies. The following questions will be addressed: Which problems appear in a cross-national comparison of the data? Which time horizons, for example, do respondent from different countries apply when they judge their pride on their countries history? What do Mexicans understand under the term “social security system” and is this comparable to the definition given by German respondents? How comparable are the understandings of “fair and equal treatment” across countries? How can these outcomes be combined with current data analytic approaches? What recommendations can be derived from the existing data?