Keywords: Methodological challenges and improvements, including in the areas of sampling, measurement, survey design and survey response or non-response

Research problem: Exploration of xenophobia and its social consequences is a fundamental sociological issue, and in connection with the European migrant (or refugee) crisis in 2015 the question arises as how to measure this phenomenon in surveys. In principle, it is important to work with a tested measure that is valid and reliable. In international surveys such as ISSP the goal is to empirically examine public attitudes towards migration. In this study, the goal was to use a measure based on a clear theoretical conceptualization of xenophobia, in which it is evident what dimension of this phenomenon was being measured. A standard xenophobia scale developed and implemented in previous research only on students in the Netherlands, the USA and Norway by van der Veer et al. (2011) was fielded to nationally representative samples in four post-communist countries in Central Europe.

Data and Methodology: In our analysis we use data collected in the Czech Republic (CVVM SOÚ AV ČR), Slovakia (Focus agency), Poland (CBOS) and Hungary (Tárki). All data were collected in the autumn of 2015. All the samples are representative of the adult population aged 18 years or older (in the Czech Republic it is 15 years+). The sample size is in all cases approximately 1,000 respondents. These survey data were collected as part of monthly omnibus surveys.

Objectives and Results: In our study we examine the validity and reliability of the xenophobia scale in all four countries using Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT). We tested both the full 9-item scale and a reduced 5-item scale that were proposed by van der Veer et al. (2011), the original developers of the xenophobia scale. Our preliminary findings using the CTT framework suggest that both the 5 and 9 item scales have reasonable scaling properties. As a majority of citizens in post-communist countries in Central Europe have no personal experience with immigrants, one question in the van der Veer et al. (2011) scale measuring contact with immigrants has a relative high item non-response rate. Therefore, we propose a different list of items for future fielding of a reduced van der Veer et al. (2011) xenophobia scale in Central Europe.