Using Mokken methods to develop robust cross-national scales: American and West German attitudes toward abortion

A fundamental methodological issue in cross-national research on attitudes is the comparability of the attitude measures across populations. We address this issue by presenting the Mokken method and accompanying Mokken test as a means for developing equivalent attitude scales. We apply these methods to an analysis of the responses to seven abortion items in the 1982 NORC GSS and West German ALLBUS combined files. We find that the seven items form a unidimensional scale in both countries and that four of these items constitute a scale that is robust across the two populations. We conclude by describing how such results can be used to guide the development of Rasch and LISREL models.