Solidarietà in Europa. Sfide contemporanee, concettuali e metodologiche per la ricerca sui valori

Solidarity is a widely discussed topic these days. A multitude of global challenges makes the issue of social togetherness more relevant than ever before. But how to investigate solidarity? And can we truly measure solidarity in a comparative way? Or is our understanding shaped by the cultural, demographic, economic, and political contexts in which individuals find themselves? In the context of contemporary challenges to European value of solidarity, the paper discusses the concept of solidarity and its multiple semantic interpretations, which also lead to methodological challenges when scholars aim to operationalize this concept and make cross-national comparisons. Building on statistical and qualitative studies dealing with measurement equivalence, the paper addresses the challenges for comparability of interindividual solidarity, as measured by the European Values Study, due to cultural sources of biases.