Fitting the World? World Values Survey, Global Citizenship, and Item-Response Theory

• In Event: Local to Global: Influence and Impact of Educational Research in the Public Interest

Abstract

One of the social sciences’ largest-ever collaborations across 140-plus countries, the World Values Survey (WVS) has yielded thousands of publications but insufficient psychometric attention. We applied item response theory (IRT) to 12 WVS items that form a global citizenship subdomain: plural geographic allegiance. Visual evidence, model-fit indices, and reliability indicators showed 2PL models to fit better than the Rasch. Findings held from the overall dataset (N = 90,292) to nation-specific subsets from Singapore, Sweden, and the US. Plural geographic allegiance was unidimensional, and all 12 items functioned differentially by nation, suggesting instrumentation threats regarding cross-national comparisons of plural geographic allegiance. We recommend rigorous uses of modern measurement methods for cross-national analyses, especially when interpretive consequences can have such global implications.

Authors

• Michael Thier, International Baccalaureate

• Lorna Porter, University of Oregon

• Paul T Beach, Inflexion