Cross-national and cross-ethnic differences in political and leisure attitudes

Using a case of Luxembourg a cross-cultural comparative perspective is linked to between as well as within country comparisons by answering a two-folded question. First we analyzed the level of measurement equivalence, i.e. the extent to which ethnic groups in Luxembourg and citizen of their countries of origin assign the same meaning to attitude questions. Secondly, we examined whether ethnic-cultural groups within Luxembourg resemble citizens from their native country more than Luxembourger?s attitudes, i.e. we compared the relative influence of a given national context and cultural background of Luxembourg?s minorities on their attitudes. We selected three scales from the EVS 2009 to demonstrate different types of result from such analyses. As expected, it turned out that cultural background is more important than national context in the case of the Portuguese minority that is culturally more distant to the Luxembourg?s native population, and that national setting is prevailing factor in the cases of German and French minorities that are well integrated in the Luxembourg society. The effect of a common national setting is also important with regards to the issue of measurement equivalence, where it contributes to greater comparability of intra-national, cross-ethnic comparisons.