Journal Article Critique: The Validity and Reliability of Cross-National Surveys Analysis

The purpose of this review paper is to provide a guideline “on how to review and comment on published scientific paper”. The original article is well-written, based on secondary data. This paper was written about a decade ago, though still very relevant and useful for the students and scholars of social and environmental sciences. This article deals with the validity and reliability of cross national survey research primarily based on secondary information. The author opens the question about the on-going validity and reliability debate and issues of post modernism on global environmentalism, pioneered by Steven R. Brechin and Willet Kempton in 1994. Eric Neumayer (2002) has effectively introduced the themes of “Global Environmentalism: A challenge to the Post-Materialism Thesis”, a paper by Brechin and Kempton (1994) which challenged the conventional wisdom that people in developing countries lack environmental values. Brechin and Kempton (1994) rejected the established notion of the western world's view of developing nations as having little concern for environmental conservation, which was until recently guided by a colonial mentality. The article by Brechin and Kempton advocates in favor of global environment concern by people of the developing world. They have used the data from Dunlap, Riley E., George H. Gallup, Jr., and Alec M. Gallup (1993a), where they show that people from the developing world are equally concerned about the environmental problems. Neumayer (2002) did not adequately describe the core concept of Brechin and Kempton in examining the validity and reliability of cross-national surveys. In this review, I will first present a snap-shot of the article in term of research design and testing of validity and reliability. And secondly, I will examine to what extent the author has succeeded in bringing to light empirical evidence on cross-national research design (see my final section on the strengths and weaknesses of the article).