Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2004 erstellt
Beschreibung:
"Large-N cross-national surveys can provide insight into human behavior that is otherwise unobtainable. They make it possible to perform empirical analyses of cross-level linkages, testing such questions as: "Are specific individual-level beliefs conducive to the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions?" or, "Is economic development linked with declining religious beliefs and more secular worldviews?" Or "Are certain individual-level beliefs conducive to economic growth?" These are questions that students of political culture, secularization and modernization have debated for decades. Since they involve individual-level beliefs, any conclusive answer requires survey data; since they also involve system-level variables such as democratic institutions, or levels of economic development, they also require data from a broad range of societies and in so far as they involve changes over time, they also require data from multiple waves of surveys. Only recently have such cross-national survey projects as the various Barometer surveys now being carried out in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, the ISSP surveys, the Comparative Election Surveys and the World Values Survey (which has just released an 80-nation dataset) begun to provide the data needed to answer such questions. The availability of cross-nationally comparable survey data from countries covering the full range of economic, political and cultural variation will not end these debates, but it will make it possible to move away from relying on stereotypes and guesswork, and base one's arguments on replicable evidence..."