[EB] Re: EUROBAROMETER RESEARCH

[Meinhard Moschner]

Just a small remark to the following mail:

>My name is Frank Aarebrot and I am an associate professor at the Department
>of Comparative Politics of the University of Bergen, Norway. I have been
>involveld in the European BIG (Belief in Governmont) project which used
>Eurobarometers 37 through 42 for all European countries. I worked mainly
>with data for the EFTA countries and the new democacies in eastern, central
>and south eastern europe.
>
>Whern getting into ths material, be prepared for most of the problems
>associated with secondary data analysis: Unstandatdized coding og background
>variables, varying sets of variables across contries. A a general rule the
>attitudinal questien have the highest consistency across countries and are
>thus of the highest quality. Unfortunately concrete variables relating to
>political behavour such as Voting preference by party is NOT standard in the
>EBs, and are thus available only for some countries, and in some cases fore
>some barometers in one country, but not for others brometers for the same
>country.
>
>Sometimes the documentation is more extensive than the data. My advise is
>threfore print out the variable labels and value labels from the SPSS files
>and use them as codebboks.
>
>In some cases several countries' files have been merged for the same EB.
>These files will often contain massive strings of missing data for questions
>asked in one country but not in another, or one variable for party
>preferences in one country and another variable for party preference in
>another country within the same merged file. Contrary, a variable such as
>femily income may be fylly merged, containing almost no missing data,
>irrespective of the fact that the countries in the file have different
>currencies. My advice is to run freqency distribution for all variables you
>intend to use and look for systematic patterns of missing cases and curious
>"camel hump" distributions in variables where one would expect approximate
>normal distribution. I chose to "unmerge" these merges files, creating a
>system of one file for each EB for each country. It you need a Europe-wide
>master merged file it is better to create it yourself after you have
>familiarized yourself with the data so that you know which variables tend to
>be available generally and consistenty coded. i.e. income can be
>recalculated into e.g. US$ using the exchange rates and THEN merged.
>
>Finally, in planning your research program. Estimate about 50 percent more
>time for nitty-gritty data cleaning than you would for say a normal US
>election study.

Frank Aarebrot obviously refers to the CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROBAROMETER
and NOT to the STANDARD EUROBAROMETER 37 through 42. The Central
and Eastern Eurobarometer are distributed as received from the principal
investigators. This implies all the problems mentioned above (especially
in the case of the first CEEB survey). 

The STANDARD EUROBAROMETER SURVEYS are processed and documented by the
ZENTRALARCHIV (Cologne) or ICPSR (Ann Arbor). All country specific
variables are well integrated and documented. At least in the final
codebook edition (now available for 37.0, 38.0 and 38.1) they are also
standardized over time. 

VOTING PREFERENCE is available for ALL Eurobarometer surveys and for ALL
participating countries. Nevertheless the responses to this question are
still under embargo for the most recent surveys (40 through 42).

MASSIVE STRINGS OF MISSING DATA only appear for NORWAY (starting with
EB 36) and FINLAND (starting with EB 39). Both countries were not (yet)
official participants (EU member countries) and only contributed a few
selected questions from the standard EB questionnaire (and some 
additional EC issues in the case of Norway).

For more details please contact ZA, ICPSR or your national data archive.

Best regards

Meinhard Moschner
Zentralarchiv fuer Empirische Sozialforschung
Cologne, Germany