Testing the Comparability of Different Types of Social Indicators Across Groups

The social indicator movement has realized a considerable increase in importance during the last 50 years. This happened not the least by the publications in the journal Social Indicators Research. Social indicators have been developed for many aspects of life. The scores on these indicators often are compared through time and across groups. An essential requirement for such research is that the measures used are comparable through time and across groups. The comparability through time is not such a big problem but the comparability of measures across groups is not so obvious. This requires harmonization of indicators based on objective variables and invariance testing for indicators based on subjective and objective variables. In this paper we discuss how the comparability of different types of social indicators based on subjective and objective variables can be tested using invariance testing. This is a relevant issue because the existing testing procedure is designed for only one type of social indicators and this test is not directly applicable on the other types of social indicators.