Lopes, Cláudia Isabel Marques de Abreu
(2012)
From description to explanation in cross-national research: the case of economic morality.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This dissertation proposes a social mechanism to explain consumer fraud from a crossnational perspective. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey and the
European Values Study, the dissertation seeks to: (1) contribute to the understanding of
consumer morality expressed by dishonest behaviour in diverse economic and cultural
contexts; and (2) demonstrate the value of research based on social mechanisms towards
the advancement and integration of theories from diverse social sciences. By addressing
individual-, national- and cross-level variation, an analysis motivated by social
mechanisms moves beyond description, helping to explain the processes underpinning
this complex social and political phenomenon.
The contribution of this dissertation is twofold. From a substantive point of view, the
dissertation fills a gap in the literature by offering a multilevel theoretical and empirical
account for consumer fraud. From a methodological perspective, the dissertation differs
from other pieces of cross-national research, making sense of cross-national data by
alluding to a social mechanism that helps to explain social phenomenon by integrating
different levels of analysis.
This dissertation begins with a general introduction followed by a theoretical chapter, a
methodological chapter, and three empirical papers, finishing with a general conclusion.
The introduction provides information that guides and sustains the subsequent chapters.
The theoretical chapter covers the substantive foundations of the research hypotheses
and empirical studies, examining the state of the art of economic morality and consumer
dishonest behaviour. The methodological chapter discusses the potentialities and pitfalls
of cross-national survey methods and analytical strategies. This discussion is enriched
by the insights of a systematic literature review—carried out in the context of this
dissertation—that inspects how social mechanisms are addressed in studies using ESS
data. The empirical studies are presented in the form of self-contained papers motivated
by different research questions addressed with cross-national data. The conclusion
brings together the partial conclusions from the three papers to reflect on
methodological implications and future directions for research.
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