Скачать или смотреть aimos2021 - Workshop: Measuring Ideology Current Practices, Consequences, and Recommendations

Workshop: Measuring Ideology Current Practices, Consequences, and Recommendations
2 Dec. 2021

Presenter: Flavio Azevedo

Political ideologies are foundational to a broad range of social science fields such as political science, and social and political psychology. Ideologies serve to aid individuals in navigating the complex socio-political world by offering an organization of values, justifying social arrangements, and describing power relations. Applied to research, scholars use diverse and wide-ranging approaches to measuring an individual's political ideology. We sought to investigate standard practices by conducting an exhaustive literature review of 400 scientific articles, spanning from the 1930s to 2020s, across social sciences sub-fields. We identified and coded 207 works, finding more than 150 unique ideological instruments measuring ideology. That is, greater than 75% of all cataloged measures were unique. We performed a content analysis to measure overlap between found measures—an indication of content validity across studies— obtaining very poor similarity indices, suggesting that topics measured across instruments vary widely from one instrument to another. The little to no overlap in approaches to the measurement of ideology suggests that scholars may not be justified in generalizing findings across studies. Lastly, we applied five different ideological scales to different established theories in the field and showed empirically that results indeed can change as a function of the instrument used. In this workshop, we are introduced with this research topic in detail in the first 45 minutes & then we will brainstorm about possible solutions to this problem across other topics and fields.