The cross-cultural use of sample surveys: problems of comparability

Abstract

This article (first published in 1968) deals with the following problems of cross-cultural research: change in the identification of problem areas; question meaning and problems of verbal communication; equivalence of in dicators; the respondent as a unit in design and analysis; the usage of ?culture? in cross-cultural surveys; adminstrative and diplomatic problems; and some social effects of com parative social research. 1. Progress as a new problem identification A review of publications based on cross-cultural surveys makes it at first ap pear doubtful that there has been definite progress in research methodology and practice.1 Published research certainly does not show a neat pattern of conti nuous ascent to ever higher levels of methodological sophistication. However, I hope to show that nevertheless such progress exists in a specific although somewhat frustrating way. In surveying surveys, one can point to some technological innovations. I think, however, that the major progress has been to increase the awareness of the real sources of difficulties. In this way, the use of surveys in cross-cultural comparisons influences our understanding of research techniques and metho dology in general. This is then my main theme: progress as changes in the awareness of problem areas, as the spreading realization that an earlier identi fication of the sources of difficulties was much too simple. Up to this day, the difficulties encountered in cross-cultural comparisons tend to be perceived as problems of research technology. However, it is now increasingly realized that the main problems are methodological in the more limited sense of this term. * Originally published in: Stein Rokkan, ed., Comparative Research across Cultures and Nations, Paris/The Hague: ISSC/Mouton 1968, pp. 176-209. We are grateful to the first editors for kindly permitting us to republish this article. 1 Compare S. Rokkan, S. Verba, J. Viet and E. Almasy, Comparative Survey Analysis (Paris, Mouton, 1968).