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Income Measures in Cross-National Surveys: Problems and Solutions*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2016

Abstract

Comparable household income measures are crucial for most social science analyses of cross-national public opinion survey data. However, income questions in many cross-national surveys suffer from comparability and interpretability limitations that have not been adequately addressed by the existing literature. In this article, we examine the income measure in one major survey, the World Values Survey (WVS), arguing that a variety of problems arise when drawing inferences—descriptive or causal, individual or aggregate—using the standard ten-category measure. We then propose and implement a number of corrections to these potential biases and present a series of diagnostics that confirm the importance of our proposed corrections. We conclude by documenting some of the same challenges in the income measures used in other cross-national surveys. The accompanying data set can be merged with the WVS to make better use of the income measure.

Type
Research Notes
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Michael J. Donnelly, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Department of Political Science, School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Toronto, 100 St. George St, Room 3018, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3 (mj.donnelly@utoronto.ca). Grigore Pop-Eleches, Professor of Politics and Public and International Affairs, 220 Bendheim Hall, Princeton University - Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Politics, Princeton, NJ 08544 (gpop@princeton.edu). To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2016.40

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Supplementary material: PDF

Donnelly and Pop-Eleches supplementary material

Appendix B

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Supplementary material: PDF

Donnelly and Pop-Eleches supplementary material

Appendix A

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