Social Surveys as a Data Source for Country-Level Indicators |
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| Coordinator 1 | Dr Marta Kolczynska (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences) |
Several fundamental social science concepts, such as social cohesion, social capital, solidarity, inequality, welfare, or legitimacy, are properties of groups and not of individuals. Some of these societal characteristics can be operationalized as aggregates of individual characteristics, estimated with survey data, and compared across countries and over time. For example, if social cohesion corresponds to the level of agreement in values, attitudes, and practices among individuals, survey data offer opportunities of describing the extent of this agreement or disagreement directly by comparing pairs of respondents. Still, such attempts at constructing country-level measures beyond simple means or proportions are rare. One exception is economic inequality, for which there exist several measures constructed via the aggregation of individual-level data, such as the Gini index, Theil index, percentile ratios, etc., and their properties are well understood.
This session invites methodological and substantive papers that use theory-informed country-level measures of social phenomena derived from survey data. Welcome contributions include, but are not limited to, papers that (a) make a case for a particular way of measuring a well-defined concept at the group (societal) level using survey data, (b) discuss different ways of measuring a group (societal) level characteristic using survey data and data from other sources, (c) use one or more measures of societal characteristics derived from survey data as dependent or independent variables in substantive models.