Ex-post harmonization of cross-national survey data: advances in methodological and substantive inquiries

Excerpt

In the social sciences, comparative surveys are a powerful tool to study how individual-level conditions for action link to contextual factors, such as levels of democracy, economic development, and various inequalities that shape opportunity structures and social phenomena across cultures and time. To ensure that answers from respondents surveyed in different settings carry minimal methodological errors and biases and can be meaningfully compared, both data producers and secondary users combine surveys from different sources, that is, they harmonize survey data. Generally, they do so at different stages of the survey lifecycle. Data producers mostly employ harmonization ex-ante, when designing and implementing comparative studies (input harmonization) and when processing the survey data in preparation for their public release (ex-ante output harmonization). These methods are also referred to as prospective harmonization (e.g Fortier et al. 2011a, b). Secondary users apply harmonization methods retrospectively to already released data files. This approach is known as ex-post output harmonization, or, simply, ex-post or retrospective harmonization (Granda, Wolf and Hadorn 2010; Fortier et al. 2011a, b; Granda and and Blasczyk 2016). …