Evi Scholz

Who is Willing to Answer Open-ended Questions on the Meaning of Left and Right?

The left-right dimension plays an important role in a wide range of political science studies, and analyses are sometimes based on responses to open-ended survey questions about the meaning of left and right. Due to a considerable non-response to these questions on the 2008 German General Social Survey, the value of the data needs to be evaluated, and response analysis is recommended before Germany’s ideological beliefs are analysed. This paper investigates whether or not respondents’ personality traits, cognitive abilities and socialisation, motivation, and left-right self-placement affect response behaviour to our open-ended questions. We found several explanatory variables: a left-right self-placement, its ideological direction, an Eastern German socialisation background, a high level of education and a strong political interest. These findings indicate that, in addition to methodological issues, substantial variables matter in response behaviour in technical terms, and ideological analysts should consider if their findings can be generalised for the entire German population.

ISSP and the ISSP 2014 Citizenship II Module: An Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and the data that has been collected by this group. Its main focus, however, is on the Citizenship module, which was published by GESIS in mid-2016. This survey includes questions on citizen rights and duties, political efficacy and interest, as well as about the political system of the respondents’ country. Details of the fieldwork, such as participating countries, sample size, sampling mode, etc. are reported, whereas first descriptive findings are shown in a separate contribution.

Methodological Aspects of Central Left-Right Scale Placement in a Cross-national Perspective:

Research on attitudinal scales has shown that respondents without opinions who are requested to select an answer mostly choose middle scale values. This paper concerns design effects on central placement on the left-right scale across countries. We tested the effects in a split-half experiment in which the left-right scale was used either with or without an explicit “can’t choose” option. Open-ended questions on the meaning of left and right shed light on scale interpretation, in particular non-response to the open-ended question for those indicating a left-right position. Our results show that the likelihood of central placement depended on several aspects and that the best indicator was non-response to the probe questions, but some effects of scale design were not robust across countries.

The ISSP 2015 Work Orientations IV Module

This special issue introduces the 2015 Work Orientations survey of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). This survey is the fourth module on Work Orientations—with previous waves fielded in 1989, 1997, and 2005. In general, the Work Orientations modules include attitudes toward work and private life, as well as respondents’ work organization and working conditions. The special issue includes an introduction summarizing the history and the content of this ISSP survey, a research note reporting descriptive results at the country level, and articles analyzing various waves of the ISSP data on Work Orientations.