ABSTRACT
The International Social Survey Program (ISSP) arose from the collaboration of three social science programs in Europe and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at Chicago, and numbered as of the late 1980s nine nations including Hungary in Eastern Europe. The European Values Study group, which conducted an extensive survey of values in nine European countries in 1981 may prove to be a continuing enterprise. The challenge to contemporary social science is to establish on a more scientific basis whether and how far these more subjective accounts are either correct or fail to reflect objective reality. A new data base carries with it not only increased potential for discovering the new, but also increased possibilities of falling into error unless we are sensitive to the peculiarities of our new sources. All of the pitfalls in the use of survey data for domestic research are present when that material is used cross-nationally, plus others peculiar to cross-national research.
