Developing quality standards for cross-national survey research: five approaches

This paper addresses methods for the development of quality standards for cross-national quantitative surveys. Five conceptual approaches to the development of standards are presented and the properties and consequences of each are discussed. The aim is to provide researchers with a rational set of arguments for choosing a particular approach in a given situation. The development of quality standards is particularly complicated in the case of cross-national research, owing to variability between nations in a number of factors that might typically be considered as 'fixed' design constraints in the context of single-country studies. This variability is illustrated by a number of examples that arose in the course of development of the European Social Survey. The paper also touches upon some related issues in the implementation and maintenance of quality standards.