Chapter 2 Cross-Cultural Research Methods Notes and Vocabulary PDF

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Class notes from Professor Eugene Derobertis's class....

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Chapter 2: Cross-Cultural Research Methods Types of Cross-Cultural Research ● First stage involved initial tests of cultural differences and discovery of fascinating cultural differences. Second stage involved search for meaningful dimensions of cultural variability that can possibly explain those differences. Third stage involved conceptual application of those meaningful dimensions in cross-cultural studies. Fourth stage (currently in) involves empirically applying those dimensions and other possible cultural explanations of behavior experimentally (not just conceptually) in order to scientifically document their effects. ● Method validation studies ○ Validity: the degree to which a finding, measurement, or statistic is accurate, or represents what it is supposed to. ○ Reliability: degree to which a finding, measurement, or statistic is consistent. ○ Research scales that are validated in one culture is not equally valid in another culture; researchers concerned with equivalence in validity of their measures, scales, and tests ○ Cross-cultural validation studies ■ Examine whether a scale, test, or measure originally developed in a culture is valid in another culture ■ Purpose is to establish equivalence of scale/test/measure across cultures ○ Indigenous cultural studies (test for differences in a psychological variable) ■ Rich descriptions of complex theoretical models within a single culture ■ Insights generated from these studies compared across studies/cultures ○ Cross-cultural comparisons (often the hypothesis that one culture will have significantly higher scores on the variable than the others) ■ Involve participants from two or more cultures who are measured on some psychological variable of interest ■ Responses obtained from different cultural samples are compared against each other Types of cross-cultural comparisons ● Exploratory vs hypothesis testing ○ Exploratory studies - studies designed to examine the existence of cross-cultural similarities or differences; generally simple, quasi-experimental designs comparing two or more cultures on a psychological variable ○ Hypothesis-testing studies - designed to test why cultural differences exist. They go beyond simple quasi-experimental designs by either including context variables or by using experiments ● Presence or absence of contextual factors ○ Context factors are any variables that can explain, partly or fully, cross-cultural differences when they are observed in a study; may involve characteristics of the participants (SES, education, age) or their cultures (economic development and religious institutions) ● Structure vs level-oriented

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Structure-oriented studies compare constructs, their measurements, or their relationships with other constructs across cultures ○ Level-oriented studies compare mean levels of variables/scores between cultures ● Individual vs ecological (cultural) level ○ Individual-level studies are those where date from individuals are the unity of analysis ○ Ecological-level studies analyze data with country or culture as the unit of analysis ● Multi-level studies ○ Studies that involve data collection at multiple levels of analysis, such as the individual level, context, community, and national culture Designing cross-cultural comparative research ● Getting the right research question ○ Must start first with a comprehensive and functional knowledge of that literature so that one understands what gaps in knowledge exist and what research questions should be addressed in order to contribute to that knowledge ○ One of the major challenges that faces cross-cultural researchers today concerns how to isolate source of such differences, and identify the active cultural (vs non-cultural) ingredients that produced those differences ○ Is the source of differences to be explained cultural or not? How do we know that to be true, and more importantly, how does one demonstrate that empirically? ● Designs that establish linkages between culture and psychological variables ○ It’s important to establish linkages between contents of culture and psychological variables of interest in hypothesis-testing studies ○ Linkage studies: studies that attempt to measure an aspect of culture theoretically hypothesized to produce cultural differences and then empirically link that measured aspect of culture with the dependent variable of interest ○ Unpackaging studies: unpackage the contents of the global, unspecific concept of culture into specific, measurable psychological constructs and examine their contribution to cultural differences ■ Context variables: operationalize aspects of culture that researchers believe produce differences in psychological variables. These are actually measured in unpackaging studies ○ Individual-level measures of culture: assess psychological dimensions related to meaningful dimensions of cultural variability and that are completed by individuals. They are often used as context variables to ensure that samples in different cultures actually harbor the cultural characteristics thought to differentiate them ■ Idiocentrism: individualism on the individual level. On the cultural level, individualism refers to how a culture functions. Idiocentrism refers to how individuals may act in accordance with individualistic cultural frameworks

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Allocentrism: collectivism on the individual-level. On the cultural level, collectivism refers to how a culture functions. Allocentrism refers to how individuals may act in accordance with collectivist cultural frameworks ○ Self-construal scales: measuring independence and interdependence on the individual level; cultural differences in self-esteem and embarrassability were empirically linked to individual differences on these types of self-construals, exemplifying utility of unpackaging studies ○ Personality: used as a context variable in many cross-cultural studies because it is associated with many psychological processes across cultures; Matsumoto measured emotional regulation (ability to modify and channel emotions) in U.S. and Japan and measured personality traits ○ Cultural practices: linkage studies that assess cultural practices such as child-rearing, nature of interpersonal relationships, cultural worldviews; ○ Experiments: studies in which researchers create conditions to establish cause-effect relationships. Participants are generally assigned randomly to participate in the conditions, and researchers then compare results across conditions ○ Priming studies: experimentally manipulating mindsets of participants and measuring the resulting changes in behavior ■ Behavioral studies: manipulations of actual environments and observation of changes in behaviors as function of those environments Bias and equivalence ● Bias: differences that do not have exactly the same meaning within and across cultures; a lack of equivalence ● Equivalence: a state or condition of similarity in conceptual meaning and empirical method bt cultures that allows comparisons to be meaningful; a lack of bias ● Conceptual bias: the degree to which a theory or set of hypotheses being compared across cultures are equivalent - that is, whether they have the same meaning and relevance in all the cultures being compared ● Method bias ○ Sampling bias: are the samples in the cultures tested appropriate representatives of their culture and equivalent to each other? ○ Linguistic bias: the semantic equivalence bt protocols (instruments, instructions, questionnaires, etc.) used in a cross-cultural comparison study ■ Back translation: a technique of translating research protocols that involves taking the protocol as it was developed in one language, translating it into the target language, and having someone else translate it back to the original. If the back-translated version is the same as the original, they are generally considered equivalent. If it is not, the procedure is repeated until the back-translated version is the same. ■ Decenter: the concept underlying the procedure of back translation that involves eliminating any culture-specific concepts of the original language or translating them equivalently into the target language

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Procedural bias: do the procedures by which data are collected mean the same in all cultures tested? Measurement bias: the degree to which measures used to collect data in different cultures are equally valid and reliable ○ Operationalization: the ways researchers conceptually define a variable and measure it ○ Psychometric equivalence: the degree to which different measures used in a cross-cultural comparison study are statistically equivalent in the cultures being compared - that is, whether the measures are equally valid and reliable in all cultures studied ○ Factor analysis: a statistical technique that allows researchers to group items on a questionnaire. The theoretical model underlying factor analysis is that groups of items on a questionnaire are answered in similar ways bc they are assessing the same, single underlying psychological construct/trait. By interpreting the groupings underlying the items, therefore, researchers make inferences about the underlying traits that are being measured. ○ Structural equivalence: the degree to which a measure used in a cross-cultural study produces the same factor analysis results in the different countries being compared. ○ Internal reliability: the degree to which different items in a questionnaire are related to each other, and give consistent responses Response bias: a systematic tendency to respond in certain ways to items or scales ○ Socially desirable responding: tendencies to give answers on questionnaires that make oneself look good ○ Acquiescence bias: the tendency to agree rather than disagree with items on questionnaires ○ Extreme response bias: the tendency to use the ends of a scale regardless of item content ○ Reference group effect: the idea that people make implicit social comparisons with others when making ratings on scales. That is, people’s ratings will be influenced by the implicit comparisons they make bt themselves and others, and these influences may make comparing responses across cultures difficult. Interpretational bias: are statistically significant findings practically meaningful? Are the interpretations made about the findings and conclusions drawn biased in some way? Are interpretations about cultural sources of differences justified by data? ○ Analyzing data: often use inferential statistics such as chi-square or ANOVA and engage in what is known as null hypothesis significance testing; compare differences observed between groups to the differences one would normally expect on the basis of chance alone and then compute the probability that the results would have been obtained solely by chance ■ Can help determine the degree to which differences in mean values reflect meaningful differences among individuals; the general class of

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statistics is called effect size statistics; when used in a cross-cultural setting, they are known as cultural effect size statistics Dealing with nonequivalent data: best approximations of the closest equivalents in terms of theory and method in a study are used; four different ways to handle: ■ 1. Preclude comparison: most conservative; not make comparison in the first place (it’s meaningless) ■ 2. Reduce the nonequivalence in the data: refocus comparisons solely on the equivalent parts of data ■ 3. Interpret the nonequivalence: make it important info concerning differences ■ 4. Ignore the nonequivalence: many ignore the problem, clinging to beliefs concerning scale invariance across cultures despite lack of evidence to support beliefs Interpreting findings: many researchers interpret data obtained through their own cultural filters, and their biases can affect their interpretations to varying degrees ■ Data that is correlational can only offer correlational inferences; cause-effect inferences are not justified in a correlational study ■ Cultural attribution fallacies: a mistaken interpretation in cross-cultural comparison studies. Cultural attribution fallacies occur when researchers infer that something cultural produced the differences they observed in their study, despite the fact that they may not be empirically justified in doing so bc they did not actually measure those cultural factors.

Conclusion ● Cross-cultural research is difficult bc going across cultures raises many important issues ○ Threats to validity, theoretical frameworks (construct bias), methods of data collection (method bias), measurement (measurement bias), responses (response bias) and analyzing data and interpreting findings (interpretational bias); even when cultures are compared correctly, there is the additional problem of how we can link the differences to meaningful aspects of culture...