Designing Response Categories of Agreement Scales for Cross-national Surveys in East Asia: The Approach of the Japanese General Social Surveys

The existing cross‐national surveys use various types of scales including 2‐point, 3‐point, 4‐point, and 5‐point scales, and the translations of response statements vary depending on responsible organizations even within the same country. This paper examines how differences in response categories of the agreement scale may impact the distribution of responses in cross‐national surveys and reports the strategies for designing the agreement scale for the East Asian Social Survey (EASS) project. Among the four EASS countries and region, the response pattern of the Japanese is somewhat different from that of Taiwanese, Korean, and Chinese people; the Japanese prefer to give a mid‐point or close‐to‐the‐middle response instead of a definite expression of agreement or disagreement. Social surveys in Japan often handle this tendency by avoiding the use of strong adverbs and excluding mid‐point and off‐scale options from agreement scales. Based on examinations of existing surveys results and conducting pretests, the following strategies to ensure procedural equivalence as well as interpretive equivalence in the EASS project were contrived: (i) The agreement scale was designed to have a sufficient variability in response distributions for all countries and the region; a 7‐point scale with the adverb “strongly” at both ends and a mid‐point was adopted. (ii) The translations of response statements as well as questions for all teams were carefully checked and adjusted through several languages.