A Review of the Cross-Cultural Survey Guidelines Website

Abstract

Earlier this year, a set of best practices for the conduct of cross-national and cross-cultural survey research were announced during the Berlin International Conference on Survey Methods in Multinational, Multi-regional, and Multicultural Contexts (http://www.3mc2008.de/). Available at: http://ccsg. isr.umich.edu/, these recommendations are intended to provide guidance to researchers who might be developing plans for cross-national, and other forms of cross-cultural, survey research. The conduct of cross-cultural survey research has rapidly grown in importance over the past several decades, and there are an increasing number of ongoing multi-national collaborative survey studies now being fielded on a regular basis by governmental, business and academic consortiums. With this increased activity, practical knowledge and experience are also being accumulated, although there have been few attempts (although see Harkness et al. 2003) to systematically organize this information and make it available to the larger survey research community, until now. This project was no small undertaking. The efforts of working groups who contributed to these guidelines had been ongoing for several years. They grew out of a CSDI (Comparative Survey Design and Implementation) initiative spearheaded by Beth-Ellen Pennell (University of Michigan) and Janet Harkness (University of Nebraska & ZUMA, Mannheim, Germany). Thirteen additional authors from multiple institutions are also credited with having contributed to these guidelines, which have been further vetted by an impressive list of reviewers. The guidelines are organized into a series of modules that cover the various steps necessary when developing, conducting and processing data from a crosscultural survey. Some of these modules deal with topics that will be very familiar to survey practitioners (e.g., sample design, questionnaire design, pretesting), albeit tailored to address cross-cultural considerations. Other modules, in contrast, focus directly on the additional methodological and operational challenges that must be confronted when conducting survey research across