Methodological Challenges in Cross-National Participation Research

Organized by:
The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP), The Hague, Netherlands
Research Institute for Nonprofit Organisations, Vienna, Austria

The Hague, The Netherlands, 16-17 January 2009

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More and more, studies are being published that use these (by now) well-known batteries of questions that capture organizational involvement, different forms of conventional and unconventional political action, and informal social contacts. Old and new methodological techniques have been used to analyze the participation data both as an explanans and as an explanandum. Attention has been directed to cross-national comparisons, causality issues, and the integration of micro-, meso-, and macro elements.

However, there are several important methodological challenges, which are common to most of these surveys, but largely remain unaddressed in the everyday practice of research. Nowadays, many scholars from all over the globe have methodological experiences with the new question batteries. There is much knowledge on the uses and shortcomings of the cross-national survey data, on methodological issues that we are all confronted with, and on possible improvements of the questionnaires. However, this knowledge appears to be widely dispersed and somewhat isolated. With this workshop we hope to bring together scholars who have done or are doing cross-national research in the field of social and political participation; especially those who have used the ESS and similar data, but also those whose experiences, conclusions, and ideas are relevant to these programs in the future.

The workshop aims to combine the methodological know-how of scholars in this research field to answer several questions. What do the question batteries we use measure, and what do they not? Are there clever ways to extent them in the questionnaires of future waves that will follow? If we use these batteries, which problems come up in cross-national analysis, and how do we cope with issues like cross-cultural equivalence? What are the substantive consequences of the methodological choices made during the measurement, data reduction, and data analysis phases? And perhaps most importantly: Are there other ways to study civic and political participation cross-nationally? Should we use other or modified questions and/ or other research methods?

In short, the goal of this workshop is bringing people together who are working in this field, to be able to exchange ideas on methodological issues and discuss about ways to improve on empirical research in the future. This should result in a more systematic program that sets the agenda for future research in terms of methodology, especially with regard to the question batteries of the ESS and similar surveys.

The workshop will be based on paper presentations. We encourage participants to take distance from the specific substantive research questions (that is, we presume that most papers have been written with substantive instead of methodological issues in mind), and open up more methodological perspectives in their presentations. Obviously, methodological papers may also be submitted, however, the methodological experiences which resulted from work on substantive papers might be just as useful.