Replication Data for: Income Measures in Cross-National Surveys: Problems and Solutions

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 10-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.

可比较的家庭收入测度，对于多数基于跨国民意调查数据的社会科学分析而言至关重要。然而，诸多跨国调查问卷中的收入问题存在可比性与解读性局限，而现有研究文献尚未对这些局限作出充分的处理与弥补。本文以世界价值观调查（World Values Survey, WVS）这一权威跨国调查为研究对象，考察其收入测度设计，指出当研究者使用标准10分类收入测度进行推断时——无论是描述性推断还是因果性推断、个体层面推断还是总体层面推断——均会面临诸多问题。随后，本文针对这些潜在偏误提出并实施了一系列修正方案，并通过一系列诊断检验验证了所提修正方案的重要性。最后，本文进一步梳理了其他跨国调查问卷所采用的收入测度同样存在的类似挑战。本研究配套的数据集可与世界价值观调查数据集合并，以更合理地使用收入测度开展相关分析。