Cross-cultural comparisons of tourist satisfaction: assessing analytical robustness

Response styles can distort survey findings. Culture-specific response styles (CSRS) are particularly problematic to cross-cultural and empirical tourism researchers using multi-cultural samples because the resulting data contamination can lead to inaccurate conclusions about the research question under study. This is particularly the case when constructs such as satisfaction are measured, which are difficult to operationalise. Nevertheless, possible culture-specific response style effects are typically ignored, thus jeopardizing the validity of reported findings. This chapter raises awareness of the problem, illustrates the problem empirically and presents a method that enables researchers to assess the robustness of empirical findings on cross-cultural differences in satisfaction to CSRS. This approach avoids the disadvantages of ignoring the problem and interpreting spurious results or choosing one single correction technique that potentially introduces new kinds of data contamination.