Diversity in Survey Items and the Comparability Problem

This chapter starts with an introduction to the incomparability problem and an overview of the diversity in survey items. This is followed by a description of the problem of incomparability of the time series on life satisfaction in the USA, Japan and The Netherlands to illustrate the problem. Next two conventional methods for scale transformation are described: the Linear Stretch Method and the Semantic Judgment of Fixed Word Value Method. We explain why they fall short to solve the comparability problem and conclude that these shortcomings require further investigations and innovative solutions to solve them.

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