During the POLPAN Seminar on Monday, April 16th, Professor Tadeusz Krauze (Hofstra University, USA, Professor Emeritus) presented a lecture entitled “Diversity of Answers in International Surveys and the Dissimilarity of Respondents”.

Abstract:

Every society needs a substantial degree of agreement on social practices, values, and attitudes. This is an aspect of social cohesion which has been – up to now – poorly measured. An attempt is made to define some fluid concepts operationally using survey data. In particular we focus on four measures: 1) discordance of pair of respondents to a question, 2) disagreement to a question across all pairs of respondents, 3) distance between respondents on all questions, and 4) dissensus among all pairs of respondents to all questions. The measure of dissensus is composed of three other ones at a lower level of generality. We visualize these measures in several ways and discuss their substantive applications and interpretations.