Master Class: Same Question, Different Meaning: Measurement for Cross-Cultural Multilingual Survey Research

22 May 2026

Dre Elisa Volpi, coordinatrice CUSO

Prof. Levente Littvay

We ask a question in a survey and assume the answer means the same thing to everyone, we think it does. That assumption is already generous in a single language and culture. Now translate that question into three, four, or twenty languages, administer it across countries with different political contexts, cultural norms, and response styles, and the assumption becomes almost heroic. How much of what we measure is the thing we want to measure, and how much is an artifact of translation, cultural framing, or the simple fact that concepts do not travel as well as one would assume.

This one-day masterclass tackles these problems. We start with the basics of measurement theory and explore what it means for a measure to be adequately conceptualized, theory-grounded, reliable, and valid, and how many things can go wrong before you even leave your own language. We then turn to the specific challenges of cross-cultural survey research: translation effects and best practices (including why back-translation alone won't save you), the culturally fluid nature of meaning, and what happens when the construct itself doesn't travel well across contexts. From there, we move to the empirical tools. We cover factor analysis as the foundation for evaluating measurement models, then build up to multi-group invariance testing using examples like the Swiss language regions, where the same country provides a natural laboratory for things that can go wrong. For situations with many groups where strict invariance is unrealistic, we introduce the alignment method, a technique for approximate measurement invariance that lets you compare across dozens of groups without forcing equality constraints that don't hold. We work through this in R using open-source tools, but also do not shy away from AI-assisted coding.

The goal is not to turn participants into psychometricians overnight. It is to give researchers who work with cross-cultural data a structured framework for theoretically thinking about measurement, where it can fail, how to detect those failures empirically, and what your options are when the data tell you your measures don't mean the same thing everywhere. Examples will be grounded in the instructor's extensive work on constructs like populism, democracy, technocracy, conspiracy mentality, and political violence.

The workshop will run between 9:00h and 16:00h.

Geneva

Levente Littvay (Levi) is Research Professor at ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence and a Senior Visiting Researcher at the Democracy Institute of Central European University, where he also used to be Professor of Political Science (2007-2023) and taught graduate courses in research design, applied statistics, and political science, received the university's Teaching Award (2015 for methods-, and 2021 for online teaching). PhD in Political Science and an MS in Survey Research and Methodology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Taught numerous research methods workshops globally and online, including introductory, advanced, and multilevel regression and structural equation modelling, experiments, causal inference, impact evaluation, latent variable models, measurement theory, missing data, introductory stats, survey design, R, research design and AI in research courses, oversaw the training of over 10,000 methods school participants as advisory board member and academic convenor of various methods schools. Founder of MethodsNET, and head of Team Survey in Team Populism where he helped spawn the Leader Profile Series and the New Populism series with The Guardian. He was a member of the European Social Survey's (ESS) Round 10 (2020-21) democracy and COVID19 module questionnaire design teams, contributor to ESS-CRONOS2, and Principal Investigator for the Comparative Study of Election Surveys (CSES) for Hungary and Tunisia. Other awards include the International Society for Political Psychology's John L. Sullivan Mentor Award, Hungarian National Research, Development, and Innovation Office's Excellence_25 grant (given to ERC Advanced grant finalists), the European University Institute's Fernand Braudel Senior Research Fellowship (2019-20), the 2022 Giovanni Sartori Prize for best paper in the Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, and 2017 Morton Deutsch Award for best article in Social Justice Research. He is published in Political Analysis, The Journal of Politics, BMC Medical Research Methodology, and others. Books include Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling with Bruno Castanho Silva and Constantin Manuel Bosancianu in SAGE's QASS (little green book) series, which was also published in Mandarin Chinese.

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