RENCORE:
Methods for Comparative
Research on Europe
FREE MOVERS IN BRUSSELS, LONDON AND AMSTERDAM: PARTICIPATION AND INTEGRATION OF EUROPEAN PROFESSIONALS IN THREE CITIES
Author(s): Adrian Favell 
PIONEERS OF EUROPE'S INTEGRATION 'FROM BELOW': MOBILITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF EUROPE IDENTITY AMONG NATIONAL AND FOREIGN CITIZENS IN THE EU: GENERAL OUTLINE OF THE PIONEUR PROJECT
Author(s): Ettore Recchi
A rising number of EU policies are based on the assumption that an increase in the mobility of persons between member States will improve productivity, reduce unemployment, make skills more accessible across borders, and speed up the European integration process. However, mobility remains extremely low. The PIONEUR-project was designed to investigate: 1) the conditions and motives of internal mobility within the EU, 2) the effects of internal mobility on the quality of life and individual prospects of movers, 3) the impact of internal and external (in particular, from accession countries) mobility on attitudes towards EU institutions and European identification. Author(s): Evi Scholz Author(s): Georg
Müller The evolution of the
European welfare states is characterized by a great number of
international and inter-institutional asynchronies. In some countries the
welfare state developed much earlier than elsewhere and certain welfare
programmes grew at a faster pace than others. This paper attemps to
measure the resulting leads and rags on an internationally unified time
scale. For this purpose the paper first focuses on the European average
trajectories which define for a given year the normal"
development-stage of those welfare systems which regulate retirement,
sickness, occupational injuries, and unemployment. This reference
trajectory is then used for assessing the number of years by which a
particular welfare system is behind or ahead of the European norm. As a
result we got five different clocks referring to the physical and the
social time of the four mentioned welfare systems. If there were only one
universal time, the five clocks should in all countries be synchronized
and run at the same pace. Due to the high standardization of the different
time scales, the afore mentioned hypothesis can easily be tested by
statistical means such as time series analysis or linear regression.
Preliminary tests show that physical time is for many European countries
different from the social time of the welfare state. Moreover, the afore
mentioned social time is perhaps even multidimensional since the
corresponding clocks are often desynchronized and running at different
paces. Since the dimensionality of social time varies by country, it may
eventually also be used for a classification of welfare states.
Author(s): Helene Milova
La démarche présentée ici a été développée dans le cadre d'une
comparaison des pratiques professionnelles d'éducateurs en internat dans
trois pays européens. L'objet de cette recherche de thèse de doctorat
était de distinguer les changements apportés dans les pratiques
éducatives suite aux différentes formes de professionnalisation des
éducateurs en France, en Allemagne et en Russie. La méthode adoptée
dans ce but est basée sur des enquêtes de type ethnographique, visant
une analyse des pratiques de travail dans des foyers d' adolecents dans
les trois pays. Parallèlement, des études bibliographiques servent à
retracer les cadres institutionnels et législatifs ainsi que les
différentes formes de développement du métier d'éducateur. L'axe
d'analyse qui se dégage de ces deux démarches, permet de comparer les
différents terrains entre eux, tout en tenant compte de la spécificité
de chaque terrain due à son contexte national. La deuxième partie de la
présentation montrera comment ont été déterminés, au fil de
l'avancement de l'analyse, les objets pertinents pour la comparaison.
L'interprétation de leurs pratiques par les acteurs eux-mêmes, était au
centre du questoinement Cela a conduit à l'étude des différents
rapports à la règle des éducateurs. Cette notion centrale a servi de
chaînon pour expliquer l'influence de la professionnalisation du métier
sur les pratiques professionnelles. On abouti d'une part, à une analyse
verticale pour chaque pays (professionnalisation - rapport à la règle -
pratique professionnelle) et d'autre part, à une analyse horizontale
(comparative) des trois terrains (influence relative de la
professionnalisation du métier sur les pratiques en établissement). Author(s): Janet A. Harkness Research on survey-relevant differences across cultures will
increasingly affect questionnaire design procedures for multinational
(multilingual) projects. This implies acknowledgement of research done in
disciplines outside of survey methodology. Most multinational survey
programmes to date opt for Ask-the-Same-Question, develop one
questionnaire (the source questionnaire), and other questionnaires needed
are translations of the source. The paper will discuss the appeal of this
approach and point out its drawbacks. It will also point to the growing
awareness of need to demonstrate 'equivalence' rather than assume it. The
paper concludes with seven practical suggestions how to improve survey
translations.
Author(s): Jürgen H.P.
Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik In attitude measurement functional
equivalence of the measurement can be controlled by standardized
procederes. In the case of socio-demographic variables the procedure of
translation and a controlling of translation is not promising because
these variables depend on societal systems but not on language. Behind
socio-demographic variables often one can find a set of different national
or specific cultural concepts. These concepts depend on national structure
and on national institutions and organizations as well as on national law.
For the measurement of socio-demographic variables one need knowledge
about the different concepts, the cultural and national structures behind
the variables and the national indicators of measurement. With this
knowledge functional equivalence of the measurement of socio-demographic
variables can be reached by harmonizing the variables. In the presentation
the way from national concepts to indicators useable in international
comparison is shown for different variables: income, education, household
and race. Author(s): Mariona Ferrer and Marta Fraile This paper aims to explain cross
national variation of citizens' support for unemployment benefits.
Previous literature has shown that comprehensive welfare programmes enjoy
an homogeneous degree of public support within countries (that is, at the
individual level) whereas the principal variation is located across
countries (that is, at the aggregated level). In contrast, public support
for targeted welfare programmes varies to a great extent both within and
between countries. In brief, our dependent variable (that is, public
support for unemployment benefits) shows a high degree of empirical
variation both at the individual and at the contextual level. This
provides an excellent test case for illustrating different ways of
modelling political and institutional contexts. The paper first explores
the causal mechanisms explaining support for unemployment benefits at the
individual level across countries. Second, it examines the extent to which
cross national variation is due to differences in the marginal
distribution of the independent variables at the individual level
(compositional effects). Third, it discusses different strategies to
operationalize indicators of institutional contexts (for instance, the
type of welfare state, the persistence of unemployment, the generosity of
unemployment benefits, etc.). Finally, the paper displays a multilevel
model explaining citizens' propensity to support unemployment benefits
across countries. It concludes with a general discussion about the
potentiality of the multilevel approach for comparative research. In sum,
the paper discusses several variants of the statistical specification of
contexts and provides an application of individual level support for
unemployment benefits using international comparative political data: the
International Social Survey Programme (ISSP-The Role of Government III,
1996-7), and other different sources of comparative aggregated data.
Author(s): Michael Braun The
notion of gender-role ideology aims at the differentiation between male
and female roles. Yet, using traditional measures this dimension might be
confounded with the importance attributed to work or income. To the degree
that the importance of work varies across countries, measures might not be
interculturally comparable. In the former socialist countries, there was
an obligation to work for both genders and after the breakdown of
socialism there has been an economic necessity for a double income. Yet,
the leveling of gender differences was restricted to the domain of work
and no attempts were made towards a more equal sharing of household work.
As a consequence, it is expected that people from former socialist
countries will have positive attitudes towards female labor-force
participation. However, these do not reflect a low level of
differentiation between men and women. In order to test this,
methodological experiments with representative samples in West Germany,
East Germany, Hungary, Canada and Spain were conducted. The first utilized
a vignette approach and permits the construction of independent indices
for importance of work and gender differentiation. The second experiment
consisted in the construction of parallel items, measuring attitudes
towards men and women. The reported research was supported by a grant from
the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation. Author(s): Nina Rother and Antonio
Alaminos This paper presents the
results of secondary analyses of existing databases (Eurobarometer,
European Value Studies), conducted in, France, Germany, UK, Italy and
Spain in order to set out the personal and contextual conditions boosting
identification with Europe among the general population (regardless of the
experience of territorial movement across EU countries). Intercultural
differences and changes over time in the field of national/European
identity and attitudes towards a multicultural society will be analyzed
and an indicator of Europeanness will be constructed. We will then figure
out whether Europeanness is correlated with support to basic social,
political and psychological values. This will help us to identify the
characteristics of Highly Europeanized Citizens.
Author(s): Pavle Sicherl A
brief explanation of time distance methodology as a new view of time
series data is provided. Existing static measures are left unchanged,
complemented by proximity in time. The novel statistical measure
S-distance measures the distance (proximity) in time between the points in
time when the two series compared reach a specified level of the indicator
X. It is a generic concept like static difference or growth rate. In the
empirical part its application to the gap between North America and Europe
in Internet users per capita will serve as a vivid example of how
different statistical measures lead to different conclusions, even about
the direction of change in digital divide. A further application provides
a time distance analysis of the indicator personal computers per capita
for 27 countries over the period 1990-2001. Time distance results bring
also new insights to the survey results. One of such examples will be the
analysis of digital divide for selected disadvantaged categories for the
EU 15 and selected countries derived form the chosen projects of the 5.
Author(s): Peter Ph. Mohler The need for Cross-Cultural Survey Methods is often denied by
statements like 'all social science is inherently comparative'. General
statements like this, however, miss the point. Cross-cultural surveys,
especially those conducted in a multitude of cultures or nations (ISSP,
ESS, Eurobarometer, Latinobarometer etc), challenge common mono- cultural
survey methods at least on three levels of equivalence: conceptual,
instrumental and analytical. On the conceptual level, researchers must be
aware of cross-cultural incommensurabilities (apples & oranges
problem). On an instrumental level, survey items can be biased differently
between cultures. Other sources of instrumental bias are different
sampling frames and field procedures. Finally, on the level of statistical
analysis, cultural or societal biases have to be taken into account.
Standard tools like factor analysis must be adapted to the cross-cultural
case. EXPERIENCES OF IMMIGRANT ADOLESCENTS Author(s): Peter Titzmann, Eva Schmitt-Rodermund and Rainer K.
Silbereisen Hassles experienced by adolescents are known to be highly influential
on their development. The consequences of hassles depend on the context,
in which hassles are experienced and therefore hassles have to be measured
separately for different contexts (e.g. Seiffge-Krenke, 1995). However,
while contexts of development are the same between local adolescents and
immigrant adolescents, hassles are only partly comparable. Immigrant
adolescents have to face additional hassles due to the new cultural
setting. The paper describes the construction and validation of a new
measure to evaluate hassles that particularly result from the "demand
of having to deal with two cultures in contact" (Berry, 1992). Three
studies on the development of the scale are presented, starting with
qualitative focus-group interviews and resulting in a 28 item
questionnaire (alpha reliability between .76 and .88). In order to
validate the scale, it was applied in a fourth study on adolescent
immigrants in Germany and Israel. If the scale is sensitive to the process
of acculturation the frequency of hassles should decrease. As expected,
analyses showed significant negative linear regression coefficients for
most of the domains. Over all, results showed only a moderate frequency of
acculturative hassles. In the sample most of the difficulties resulted
from language and peer problems, and only few were experienced in the
domain of discrimination and the family context. Group differences were
not observed with regard to country of origin. The new scale proved to be
a reliable and valid measure with which to investigate acculturative
hassles of immigrant adolescents. Difficulties are not as frequent as are
often reported e.g. in qualitative literature. Several questions remain
for discussion and further research: in particular the influence of
positive experiences and the overall only moderate frequency of hassles.
HOW FACET THEORY CAN ASSIST RESEARCHERS IN
DIFFERENT STAGES OF SURVEY PROCESS Author(s): Sabine Klein When being interested in conducting a survey in a topic area which has
not been subject of any (empirical) research before, designing the
questions/questionnaire needs a solid base. Facet Theory can provide such
a solid base. In our research project on the attitudes of the German
population towards self-defense, we started with a pool of numerous
"typical" but unsystematic law cases dealing with self-defense.
Facet Theory proved to be the means to rearrange and modify them, firstly
to make them more systematic and secondly to make them more explicit, both
with regard to the assumptions that were to be tested. These
"new" cases formed an essential part of the questionnaire.
Preceding the main survey, a cognitive pretest was conducted to evaluate
the cases, again Facet Theory was used to design this pretest survey.
Last, not least it promoted the analysis of the data. From an
international and comparative point of view, Facet Theory provides a
framework, which facilitates replication of a survey in other countries as
it identifies all the relevant aspects that have to be part of a question.
It can be a helpful and valuable assistant when translating the
questionnaire. The experiences and findings of this research project with
respect to Facet Theory can easily be adopted by other researchers who
have different topics of interest.