We Have Come a Long Way and We Have a Long Way to Go: A Cross-Survey Comparison of Data Quality in 16 Arab Countries in the Arab Barometer vs the World Values Survey

Abstract

With the launch of the Arab Barometer (AB) project and the incorporation of Arab countriesin the World Values Survey (WVS) in the 2000s, public opinion scholars have increasinglyturned their attention to the Arab region. However, remarkably little is however known aboutthe quality of these data. To our knowledge, Arab surveys have never been scrutinized in asystematic empirical cross-survey study. Therefore, this study compares sixteen surveys fromthe AB with sixteen from the WVS concerning four attitudes widely studied by substantivescholars: generalized and institutional trust and gender equality in education and in politics.We assess the comparability of their univariate distributions and their predictors in multivariatemodels. Our results show considerable diversity across and even within surveys in quality,indicating that blanket statements on Arab surveys’ (lack of) quality are inappropriate. In aminority of tested cases (17%), the conclusions of scholars on what predicts trust or genderequality depend completely on the chosen data source. We also test whether often-heard reasonsfor Arab surveys’ supposed lack of quality explain the diversity in survey quality. Ourresults show that neither sample differences nor enumerator fraud drives discrepancies, butthere might be some influence of socially desirable answers