Cross-Cultural Analysis by Davidov Eldad Schmidt Peter Billiet Jaak

Author:Davidov, Eldad,Schmidt, Peter,Billiet, Jaak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

10.4.2 Macro–Micro Links

10.4.2.1 Economic Conditions and Perceived Threat

Group conflict theory claims that, under unfavorable economic conditions, intergroup competition becomes more intense and that consequently, perceptions of economic threat increase (Hypothesis 2). To test this assertion, I calculate the correlation between three different indicators of the health of national economy on the one hand, and the country-mean on latent variable ECOTHREAT on the other. The country-means are estimated by means of a multigroup structural SEM (again taking measurement equivalence constraints into account). The country-means are controlled for education, gender, and age, so that differences in the composition of population with respect to these variables cannot influence country averages.

Measurement equivalence tests have shown that for seven countries in the ESS data set, partial scalar equivalence for ECOTHREAT is missing (Meuleman, 2009). As a result, country-mean comparisons for these countries could lack validity. However, it was also shown that the bias resulting from this inequivalence is relatively small, and does not substantially affect country rankings.12 Therefore, I argue that it is still possible to make comparisons that are based on country rank orders. Concretely, I calculate Spearman rank-order correlations, rather than the more conventional Pearson correlation coefficient. Because the correlations are calculated at the national level, the number of observations (20 or 21, depending on the availability of context indicators) is very small, leading to a lack of statistical power. Therefore, I decided to use α = .10 as a significance level. I am aware of the fact that this decision carries an increased risk of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis. The rank-order correlations are given in Table 10.4.

Table 10.4

Spearman Rank-Order Correlations Between ECOTHREAT and Indicators of the Economic Situation Spearman Correlation p-Value N

GDP per capita (2002)

   –0.60

.0039

21

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