Conferences

Responses to a set of items are usually associated with socio-demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and education, but they are also associated with response styles, such as a tendency to “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree”, and with misunderstandings of words and phrases. Further, in different countries the meanings of words, phrases, or sentences may differ even when the translation is of high quality as it yields for the ISSP. Finally, differences in the quality of data often occur, since each country has its own research group and institute responsible for the field work. When analyzing a battery of items, responses are related to the substantive concept and to methodological effects (for example, response sets). Applying multiple correspondence analysis and categorical principal component analysis to an item battery of the ISSP data allows us to assess what part of the responses is due to substantive relationships and what part is attributable to methodological artifacts. Using as an example the items of political efficacy and trust, our findings call into question the substantive relationships between political efficacy and trust and socio-demographic indicators as reported in the literature.