RESPONSE STYLES IN CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH – EVIDENCE FROM HISTORICAL REGIONS

The study aims to identify differences in response styles between regions which belong to Romania, but have previously been under foreign occupation. To do that, we employ data from the European Social Survey, the 2006 round. We investigate extreme response styles as this is known as a common problem in cross-cultural research. Extreme response styles increase reliability, but affect the validity as all correlation specific methods can be biased in this case. We compare response styles across regions and inside regions using language as a factor variable to identify ethnic groups. Results show that in some cases there are significant differences between regions of the same country, whereas there are none for neighbouring regions belonging to different countries.