Concepts of Confidence in Tendency Survey Research: An Assessment with Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis

In this paper, we investigate the link between the formal definition of confidence in tendency surveys and its measurement. We advocate for the use of reflective measures in an assessment of the confidence level in both consumer and industrial indicators. Based on the data from Poland’s tendency survey research, we use a multi-group confirmatory factor analytical approach to demonstrate that the set of indicators proposed by the European Commission methodology that is currently used might be not appropriate to measure the concept of confidence consistently, both within and between periods. The conclusion is true for the confidence indicator in the area of consumer tendency surveys and for the tendency survey in the manufacturing industry. We search for possible amendments that help either to find the sources of instability for the indicators proposed by the guidelines of the European Commission or to select a different set of indicators for the concept of confidence. However, we determine that the differences between the newly proposed indicator that describe industrial confidence and the indicators based on the European Commission methodology are small in terms of correlations and predictive validity.