Associational Membership and Social Capital in Comparative Perspective: a Note on the Problems of Measurement

Laura Morales Diez de ULZURRUN

Politics & Society, 2002, vol. 30, issue 3, 497-523

Abstract: Organizational membership seems to be linked to a more participatory and informed political culture, to foster electoral participation, and to promote positive feelings toward democracy. More recently, the social capital and associative democracy debates have introduced new arguments about the positive effects of associational involvement. However, little attention has been paid to the problems of measuring associational involvement and to their consequences for our theories. This article discusses the various problems of validity and reliability of our measurements of associational membership. It is shown that different questionnaire formats produce substantially different results. The article also addresses the issue of measurement errors and emphasizes the problems they introduce when doing cross-national comparisons.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329202030003005 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:30:y:2002:i:3:p:497-523

DOI: 10.1177/0032329202030003005

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().