New Democracies Barometer Questionnaires
Comparative analysis requires a conceptual language that can be used to classify observations from a multiplicity of countries. The elements that make up the basic concepts of chemistry are identified by number and Latin is used in botany; the New Democracies Barometer questionnaire uses English. Altogether, NDB surveys are undertaken in 13 different languages. The design of the questionnaire is the responsibility of Professor Richard Rose, Centre for the Study of Public Policy. The responsibility for dealing with the survey institutes in each country, including the dissemination and verification of translation, is that of the Paul Lazarsfeld Society, Vienna, for which Dr. Christian Haerpfer has been the scientific secretary.
Comparative analysis requires pooling surveys from different countries in a single large data base. Typically there is a 10-country machine-readable SPSS file of approximately 10,000 cases in each NDB year. For each NDB round, national files have been merged in Vienna in a single multi-national data base. This makes it possible to see at a glance how countries compare in answers given to the same question. The overall distribution of the multi-national file creates the NDB mean. Each country can then be compared with the mean in order to see how typical or how far from the mean is one nation's pattern of responses.
Because of our commitment to prompt circulation of knowledge about and within post-Communist societies, both questions and answers for each year have been published in NDB Studies in Public Policy.
The SEEC (Search Europe Electronically on Concepts) system is specially designed to help an inquirer find what he or she is looking for in a complex multi-national, multi-year data basis. The user simply types in topics of interest, selects questions that are of interest, and can call up tables to taste by country, years and by standard cross-tabulations. This avoids the tedious process of scrolling down a series of questionnaires looking for individual items, and having to compile lists indicating which years and which countries each question has been asked in.
Here, we present the complement: the text of each multi-national NDB questionnaire, so that the reader can see the sequence and context in which questions are asked. In constructing the multi-national data base, we have faced the ineluctable problem that answers to a common question may not be exactly comparative. Education is a good example, for national institutions do not follow an identical pattern in organizing elementary, vocational, secondary academic and university education. Hence, we have used our best judgment in matching national systems to our conceptual template of four levels of education. Occasionally, questions have not been not asked in every country, because they are inappropriate in some national contexts or a supplementary grant has made possible asking a few additional questions in a few countries. Accidental dropping of a question or the use of alternatives not matching the multi-national template can result in no answer being recorded for one country for a particular question. The names of the regions into which each country is divided, or the names of the political parties used with questions about voting are not given here. This would be tedious in the extreme; they are contained on the original multi-national and national files.
The first NDB questionnaire was written in Vienna in September, 1991,
drawing on the experience of lengthy CSPP surveys in Bulgaria and then
Czechoslovakia in spring, 1991. The Soviet Union was still in existence and there was much uncertainty and turbulence. Each subsequent NDB questionnaire has repeated some items from the previous round, added fresh questions. While the length of a questionnaire is variable, it cannot be infinite. Hence, each
NDB round has had to drop some questions asked in previous surveys and, to maintain its commitment to seeing the world as the people living through transformation see it, give priority to distinctive features of new democracies and a multiplicity of economies, civil, uncivil and non-monetized. The turnover of questions has meant that the numbering of a particular question may change from one year to the next, even though the text remains the same.
NDB I (1991).
NDB II (Winter 1992-93).
NDB III (Winter 1993-94).
NDB IV (Autumn, 1995).
NDB V (Winter/Spring, 1998).