ICCS 2009 Technical Report - IEA

Student survey participation standardsThe categories for sampling participation in the ICCS student survey were defined according tothe criteria presented in Table 7.5.Teacher survey participation standardsThe sampling participation categories for the teacher survey were similar to those for thestudent survey. High response rates in the teacher survey were harder to achieve than in thestudent survey. However, there is no statistical justification for treating teacher data differentlyfrom student data with regard to an assessment of possible non-response bias, especially asteachers’ motivation to participate in ICCS may have depended on the subjects they wereteaching, or on their general attitude toward civic and citizenship education. Because nonresponsegenerally held a high potential for bias in both parts of the study, the participationrequirements in the teacher survey were as strict as the ones in the student survey. The threecategories for teacher sampling participation were defined according to the criteria set down inTable 7.6. 2Reporting dataIn those instances where a participating country could not be placed in participation Category1, the ICCS research team considered it necessary to make readers of the international reportsaware of the increased potential for bias. Please note that regardless of the participationcategory, all results were published, and no country was deleted from the international databaseor the international report for not having met the sample participation requirements. However,based on the sample participation categories, the survey results were reported in different ways:• Category 1: Countries in this category appear in the tables and figures in the internationalreports without annotation.• Category 2: Countries in this category are annotated in the tables and figures in theinternational reports.• Category 3: Countries in this category appear in a separate section of the tables.England failed to meet the requirements of the student survey, but only by a very close margin.This situation also applied to the Irish teacher survey participation. Because the data quality wasnot regarded as being significantly worse than for most other countries, the ICCS research teamdecided to include the data in the main part of the corresponding tables but to annotate thesedata by stating that the country “nearly satisfied guidelines for sample participation only afterreplacement schools were included.”In the Netherlands, the teacher participation rate was extremely low, which made it impossibleto generalize from sample data to population characteristics. Therefore, weights were notcalculated, and the country was not included in the analysis of teacher data in the ICCSinternational reports. In Greece, unapproved teacher selection procedures were applied in themajority of schools, which made it impossible to calculate sampling weights. Therefore, itwas not possible to report the country’s teacher data together with the results from the othercountries.Table 7.7 lists the participation categories of each country for the student and the teachersurveys.2 Although the teacher survey data from the Czech Republic had satisfactory sample participation rates without the use ofreplacement schools, these data were erroneously annotated in the international reports as having met sample participationrequirements only after the inclusion of replacement schools.SAMPLING WEIGHTS AND PARTICIPATION RATES83