TY - JOUR

T1 - Evaluating the response effort and data quality of established political solidarity measures

T2 - a pre-registered experimental test in an online survey of the German adult resident population in 2021

AU - Goerres, Achim

AU - Höhne, Jan Karem

N1 - Funding Information: We would like to thank Jakob Kemper (University of Duisburg-Essen) for his great assistance during the preparation of this study. We are also grateful to numerous members of the Working Group for Empirical Political Science (University Duisburg-Essen) for their great support during survey pre-testing. The respondents were reached by a sample-only commission to the survey company Forsa that drew a sample of their online access panel. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. We acknowledge financial support by the European Research Council (ERC; grant number: 864818) through the Consolidator Grant POLITSOLID (2021-25, https://bit.ly/politsolid ).

PY - 2023/12

Y1 - 2023/12

N2 - This experimental study aims to check and improve the quality of 16 established survey measures of political solidarities and related concepts, such as redistribution and social trust. Political solidarities are defined as one’s willingness to share the costs that result from public redistribution that favours people other than oneself and thus constitute a subset of welfare state attitudes. The pre-registered study plan included suggestions for the development of improved rating scales, which we defined as five-point, end verbalized rating scales without non-substantive answer options. The overall results from an experimental online survey in Germany indicate differences in response effort in terms of response times but almost no differences in data quality in terms of criterion validity. Thus, the 16 survey measures show solid instrument validity as well as minor improvements in respondents’ response times. Indeed, the measures are (at least) in the online survey world of Germany of high-quality and warrant inclusion in future surveys with small efficiency gains still attainable.

AB - This experimental study aims to check and improve the quality of 16 established survey measures of political solidarities and related concepts, such as redistribution and social trust. Political solidarities are defined as one’s willingness to share the costs that result from public redistribution that favours people other than oneself and thus constitute a subset of welfare state attitudes. The pre-registered study plan included suggestions for the development of improved rating scales, which we defined as five-point, end verbalized rating scales without non-substantive answer options. The overall results from an experimental online survey in Germany indicate differences in response effort in terms of response times but almost no differences in data quality in terms of criterion validity. Thus, the 16 survey measures show solid instrument validity as well as minor improvements in respondents’ response times. Indeed, the measures are (at least) in the online survey world of Germany of high-quality and warrant inclusion in future surveys with small efficiency gains still attainable.

KW - Data quality

KW - Online survey

KW - Political solidarities

KW - Rating scale design

KW - Response behaviour

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85146705662&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s11135-022-01594-4

DO - 10.1007/s11135-022-01594-4

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85146705662

VL - 57

SP - 5431

EP - 5447

JO - Quality and Quantity

JF - Quality and Quantity

SN - 0033-5177

IS - 6

ER -