Abstract
Growing globalisation of the world draws attention to cultural differences between people from different countries or from different cultures within the countries. Notwithstanding the diversity of people’s worldviews, current cross-cultural research still faces the challenge of how to avoid ethnocentrism; comparing Western-driven phenomena with like variables across countries without checking their conceptual equivalence clearly is highly problematic. In the present article we argue that simple comparison of measurements (in the quantitative domain) or of semantic interpretations (in the qualitative domain) across cultures easily leads to inadequate results. Questionnaire items or text produced in interviews or via open-ended questions have culturally laden meanings and cannot be mapped onto the same semantic metric. We call the culture-specific space and relationship between variables or meanings a ’cultural metric’, that is a set of notions that are inter-related and that mutually specify each other’s meaning. We illustrate the problems and their possible solutions with examples from quantitative and qualitative research. The suggested methods allow to respect the semantic space of notions in cultures and language groups and the resulting similarities or differences between cultures can be better understood and interpreted.
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Notes
A note on terminology is due here: We follow Quine’s (1960) suggestion of the equivalence of culture and language. Particularly in our discussion of qualitative methods we feel free to use both terms as being virtually co-extensive.
There were two participants from the USA, two from Japan and one from Germany. Thus, not for all of them English was their native language, but as they were senior and internationally recognized researchers, their English level was certainly close to native speakers’ level.
There is an interesting development in statistics called Finite Mixture Modelling that could potentially become a tool for cross-cultural comparison. Building on work by Weller (1984) and Krackhardt (1987), the method models consensus in a way that allows to “identify situations in which multiple distinct but disagreeing beliefs exist between subgroups of individuals” (Mueller and Veinott 2008, p. 899). This method may allow us to understand how cultural differences affect beliefs and attitudes, but the method is still under development and does not yet allow final evaluation (Mueller, Sieck, and Veinott 2007).
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Acknowledgment
Writing of this paper by Karolina Hansen was supported by the post-doctoral internship ‘Fuga’ awarded to her by the Polish National Science Centre (DEC-2013/08/S/HS6/00573).
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Wagner, W., Hansen, K. & Kronberger, N. Quantitative and Qualitative Research across Cultures and Languages: Cultural Metrics and their Application. Integr. psych. behav. 48, 418–434 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9269-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9269-z