Sample correlations Sample correlations by gender Sample correlations by age Sample correlations by education Contrast Conclusion One of the reasons for the harmonization of personal income in addition to household income was to check if the two correlate highly enough to use household income as a substitute for personal income in analyses where economic status is a control variable. This would be great, because household income variables are available in 1177 surveys out of 1721 analyzed in the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1, while personal income only in 453 surveys.
Data Number of response options Item non-response Distributions Harmonized target variables Next steps with Przemek Powałko
Individual economic status is a necessary element of almost all sociological analyses, including studies of political attitudes and behavior. To supplement the already harmonized variables in the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1 and for the purposes of my resesarch of the effects of education on political engagement, Przemek and I harmonized two additional variables: personal income and household income1.
Cross-national survey projects conduct surveys on representative samples of adult populations. How do the distributions of respondents’ age vary across surveys carried out in the same country in different years and different projects?
Like in a couple of previous posts (here, here and here) I use data from the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1, which includes selected harmonized variables from 22 cross-national survey projects. SDR only includes surveys that claim to have samples representative for adult populations.
Data Differences within country-years Differences by groups Gender Age Urban/rural residence Education Sampling scheme The growth in cross-national survey projects in the last decades leads to situations when two or more surveys are carried out in the same country and the same year but in different projects, and contain overlapping sets of survey questions. Assuming that the surveys are based on representative samples - a claim that major cross-national survey projects typically make - it could be expected that estimates from surveys carried out in the same country and year are reasonably close.
Educational attainment data OECD data SDR data Cleaning and merging SDR and OECD data Results The curious case of ISSP Switzerland Conclusion Appendix with Przemek Powałko
General population surveys with representative samples should have a similar education structure as shown by data from administrative sources, especially if survey weights are used. In this post we compare sample aggregates from 15 cross-national survey projects (including the European Social Survey, the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, and others) from the Survey Data Recycling database with educational attainment statistics from the OECD.
