We Have Come a Long Way and We Have a Long Way to Go: A Cross-Survey Comparison of Data Quality in 16 Arab Countries in the Arab Barometer vs the World Values Survey
With the launch of the Arab Barometer (AB) project and the incorporation of Arab countries in the World Values Survey (WVS) in the 2000s, public opinion scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the Arab region. However, remarkably little is however known about the quality of these data....
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Main Authors: | , |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
European Survey Research Association
2024-08-01
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Series: | Survey Research Methods |
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/7948 |
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Summary: | With the launch of the Arab Barometer (AB) project and the incorporation of Arab countries
in the World Values Survey (WVS) in the 2000s, public opinion scholars have increasingly
turned their attention to the Arab region. However, remarkably little is however known about
the quality of these data. To our knowledge, Arab surveys have never been scrutinized in a
systematic empirical cross-survey study. Therefore, this study compares sixteen surveys from
the AB with sixteen from the WVS concerning four attitudes widely studied by substantive
scholars: generalized and institutional trust and gender equality in education and in politics.
We assess the comparability of their univariate distributions and their predictors in multivariate
models. Our results show considerable diversity across and even within surveys in quality,
indicating that blanket statements on Arab surveys’ (lack of) quality are inappropriate. In a
minority of tested cases (17%), the conclusions of scholars on what predicts trust or gender
equality depend completely on the chosen data source. We also test whether often-heard reasons
for Arab surveys’ supposed lack of quality explain the diversity in survey quality. Our
results show that neither sample differences nor enumerator fraud drives discrepancies, but
there might be some influence of socially desirable answers
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ISSN: | 1864-3361 |