Cross-cultural Analysis ─ Methods and Applications

Intended to bridge the gap between the latest methodological developments and cross-cultural research, this interdisciplinary resource presents the latest strategies for analyzing cross-cultural data. Techniques are demonstrated through the use of applications that employ cross-national data sets such as the latest European Social Survey. With an emphasis on the generalized latent variable approach, internationally prominent researchers from a variety of fields explain how the methods work, how to apply them, and how they relate to other methods presented in the book. Syntax and graphical and verbal explanations of the techniques are included. A website features some of the data sets and syntax commands used in the book.

Applications from the behavioral and social sciences that use real data-sets demonstrate:

• The use of samples from 17 countries to validate the resistance to change scale across these nations
• How to test the cross-national invariance properties of social trust
• The interplay between social structure, religiosity, values, and social attitudes
• A comparison of anti-immigrant attitudes and patterns of religious orientations across European countries.

The second edition includes six new chapters and two revised ones presenting exciting developments in the literature of cross-cultural analysis including topics such as approximate measurement invariance, alignment optimization, sensitivity analyses, a mixed-methods approach to test for measurement invariance, and a multilevel structural equation modeling approach to explain noninvariance.

This book is intended for researchers, practitioners, and advanced students interested in cross-cultural research. Because the applications span a variety of disciplines, the book will appeal to researchers and students in: psychology, political science, sociology, education, marketing and economics, geography, criminology, psychometrics, epidemiology, and public health, as well as those interested in methodology. It is also appropriate for an advanced methods course in cross-cultural analysis.

Eldad Davidov is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne, Germany and the University of Zurich, Switzerland

Peter Schmidt is Professor Emeritus of Methodology of Social Research at the University of Giessen and Humboldt Research Fellow of the Polish Foundation for Basic Research

Jaak Billiet is Professor Emeritus at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Bart Meuleman is Associate Professor and head of department at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO) at the University of Leuven (Belgium)