How to Obtain Comparable Measures for Cross-National Comparisons

Comparisons of means or associations between theoretical constructs of interest in cross-national comparative research assume measurement invariance, that is, that the same constructs are measured in the same way across the various nations under study. While it is intuitive, this assumption needs to be statistically tested. An increasing number of sociological and social psychological studies have been published in the last decade in which the cross-national comparability of various scales such as human values, national identity, attitudes toward democracy, or religiosity, to name but a few, were tested. Many of these studies did not manage to fully achieve measurement invariance. In this study we review, in a nontechnical manner, the methodological literature on measurement invariance testing. We explain what it is, how to test for it, and what to do when measurement invariance across countries is not given in the data. Several approaches have been recently proposed in the literature on how to deal with measurement noninvariance. We illustrate one of these approaches with a large dataset of seven rounds from the European Social Survey (2002–2015) by estimating the most trustworthy means of human values, even when strict measurement invariance is not given in the data. We conclude with a summary and some critical remarks.