The Boundaries of Culture

Abstract

Cultural phenomena are usually viewed as possessing some temporal stability. Measured properly, the dimensions that they yield have convincing predictive properties and create clear geographic or economic clusters of countries. Using these criteria, we assess the nature of 10 World Values Survey items that address societal norms. We find that they form two factors at the ecological level. Only one of these (personal-sexual) is unambiguously a cultural dimension, associated with previous measures of conservatism and collectivism; the second one (illegal-dishonest) is not. We conclude that although some norms are within the domain of culture, others are only weakly associated with it. We also comment on the implications of our findings for Gelfand’s tightness versus looseness as a dimension of national culture reflecting attitudes toward norms.

Keywords

societal norms national culture cultural dimensions

Defining culture has proven to be one of the most difficult and controversial tasks for all those involved in its study. Nevertheless, modern definitions often focus on its subjective nature (Triandis, 1972) and include concepts such as “patterns of thought” (Brown, 1991) and “software of the mind” (Hofstede, 1980; Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010). In this article, we ask a specific question about the contents and boundaries of subjective culture: Should societal norms be viewed as part of it?

Summarizing various definitions in the U.S. sociology literature, Hechter and Opp (2001) outlined two perspectives on societal norms. According to the first, social norms entail a moral element and are “behavior that people believe ought (or ought not) to be performed regardless of the outcome for the agent” (p. xiii). The other perspective is less restrictive: “behavioral regularities that generate social expectations without any moral obligations” (p. xiii). For the purpose of our study, we will accept a paraphrased version of the first of these definitions: Norms are beliefs about the social acceptability of behaviors.

Hechter and Opp (2001) indicate that most of the work on societal norms is done in the field of political science, international relations, and sociology; there is also considerable interest in norms in the field of philosophy. Attempts by Hechter and Opp to engage anthropologists who might contribute chapters for their edited book on social norms “came to naught” (p. xix). Yet this apparent lack of interest in norms in the field of anthropology should not lead to a conclusion that they are not to be viewed as part of culture. In his review of Hechter and Opp’s book, Feld (2002) points out that whatever one’s theoretical perspective is, there is little question that social norms are a primary source of social order. Like values and social axioms, they are learned through socialization. This makes them good candidates for inclusion in the concept of culture, as the latter has been defined in the anthropological literature as patterns of thought and behavior passed between and within generations (Brown, 1991). Furthermore, there is sufficient anecdotal evidence to conclude that norms about what is socially allowed or not are not the same in all societies. For instance, the degree of permissible nudity in public places for both men and women varies drastically across the world.

However, transmissibility through socialization and cross-cultural variability are not sufficient criteria to consider a particular phenomenon as cultural. Minkov (2013) discusses various other criteria for deciding whether a particular phenomenon might be considered part of culture or not. Some of these are relevant to our study. First, there is some agreement in the literature that culture is something relatively stable, accounting for durable differences between societies (Hofstede, 2001; Inglehart, 2008; Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Minkov, 2011, 2013). Rapidly shifting political moods in a nation need not be considered part of a nation’s culture (Minkov, 2011, 2013). Thus, if norms have a strong cultural element, they should be characterized by some resistance to change.

Another criterion was borrowed from the work of Terracciano et al. (2005). Those authors claim that properly measured average national personality traits should produce interpretable geographic maps. Indeed, Gelade (in press) provides statistical evidence that the national or ethnic Big Five indices in McCrae (2002) and Schmitt, Allik, McCrae, and Benet-Martinez (2007) do correlate convincingly with geographic location. Similarly, Georgas, van de Vijver, and Berry (2004) found systematic relationships between well-known dimensions of national culture and cluster membership of countries on ecosocial indices. Dobson and Gelade (2012) showed that most of the best known dimensions of national culture also correlate with geographic location or economic development. Most important, clear geographic or economic maps were produced by the Chinese Culture Connection (1987), a cross-national study based on a supposedly comprehensive list of Chinese values, and by Schwartz (1994, 2008), whose value inventory is said to encompass all motivationally distinct values across the globe (Schwartz, 2008). Minkov’s (2011) analysis of a collection of national statistics reflecting various behaviors influenced by culture (murder rates, adolescent fertility rates, HIV rates, road death tolls, transparency versus corruption, educational achievement, and percentage adults living with parents) also yielded remarkably clear geo-economic configurations. If norms are in the domain of culture, there is no obvious reason to expect that they will be different from personality traits, personal values, or behaviors in this respect.

There is also a third logical criterion. Anthropologists have pointed out that the elements of culture are integrated (Haviland, 1990). The practical implication of this observation is that any cultural variable should be susceptible to validation through statistical associations with other cultural variables. The available indices of national culture in the best known large-scale cross-cultural studies so far usually pass this test with flying colors. If norms are part of culture, they should also pass this test.

In this study, we focus on a particular set of norms studied by the World Values Survey (WVS). The items of interest (v198 through v208 in the 2005-2008 wave of the WVS) were drawn from what is known as the Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale (MDBS; Harding & Phillips, 1986). Ten of these items were analyzed by Vauclair and Fischer (2011) in an attempt to find whether cultural values predict individuals’ moral attitudes. Using pooled individual-level data from WVS waves between 1981 and 2004, Vauclair and Fischer obtained and reported two clearly distinguished individual-level factors. The first one grouped the items about the acceptability of homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, divorce, euthanasia, and suicide. That factor was called “personal-sexual.” The remaining items, asking about the acceptability of breaking laws and government rules for personal financial gain, defined the second factor. It was called “illegal-dishonest.” The first factor was associated with measures of values, whereas the second was not. Vauclair and Fischer stated that their findings shed light on the debate of the relativity versus universality of morality.

We ask a different question: Do the MDBS items in the WVS pass the above-mentioned criteria for consideration as indicators of variation in culture (rather than in political moods or something else) across nations or not? An even more pragmatic question follows from this one: If researchers wish to discover meaningful cross-national variance reflecting cultural differences, rather than differences of a different nature, should they use items like the MDBS in the WVS or not? Vauclair and Fischer’s (2011) study suggests that the answer to this question depends on the type of item: The personal-sexual items are closely associated with measures of values and consequently reveal something about culture, whereas “the rejection of dishonest–illegal behaviours is not strongly related to culturally specific attributes” (p. 652). Yet Vauclair and Fischer admit that the between-country variability is different from zero, “justifying follow-up analyses using country level predictors” (p. 652). Furthermore, those authors tested the temporal stability of the MDBS results by splitting the data into two time cohorts and analyzing the predictors of the data within each cohort. The similarity of the results was taken as evidence of temporal stability. We believe that an additional test is necessary: correlations between MDBS measures from different periods.

Our study was inspired also by another important perspective on societal norms. Gelfand, Nishii, and Raver (2006) elaborated a theory associated with a cultural dimension called tightness versus looseness. It is expected to reflect societal differences in tolerance of deviations from societal norms. Tighter cultures should be less likely to allow such deviations. The authors of the theory also indicate that the cultural dimension of tightness-looseness “captures unique cultural variance” (p. 1227) and differs from individualism versus collectivism. Subsequently, Gelfand et al. (2011) provided an empirical measure and a national index of tightness-looseness. They did not measure tightness-looseness in terms of acceptability of deviations from specific norms as the MDBS in the WVS does but asked abstract questions about acceptability of deviations from norms in general. This operationalization does not reveal what norms the respondents had in mind when they answered the questions. However, it is implausible to expect that tight societies would leave the domains addressed by the MDBS unregulated. If they do not have strong bans on deviations from norms concerning sexual relationships and life versus death decisions as well as illegal and dishonest behaviors, what do they regulate?

Of course, it is possible to theorize abstractly that a particular tight society may strongly discourage abortion while allowing suicide, whereas the situation in another tight society is precisely the opposite. Thus, tight societies resemble each other in that they have strong norms, but these norms are not about the same behaviors. If that is so, tightness is an emic phenomenon and studying it etically becomes problematic. What is the utility of knowing that a particular society has some strong norms in some specific domains, but not in others, if we do not know what those domains are since each society is an idiosyncratic case?

This reasoning resulted in a hypothesis that the tightness-looseness index in Gelfand et al. (2011) should be closely associated with the dimensions that the MDBS yields. Thus, the second goal of our study was to find out if this is the case.

Method

We conducted all our analyses at the ecological level: The units of analysis were always the countries in the WVS, not the individual respondents. We used aggregated country-level item scores as reported in the official WVS site: www.worldvaluessurvey.com.

The latest wave of the WVS (2005-2008) has fielded 11 MDBS items that address societal norms. The first 10 of these were also fielded in the 1981-2004 surveys and are appropriate for temporal comparisons. They are reproduced below, with their 2005-2008 codes:

– Please tell me for each of the following statements whether you think it can always be justified, never be justified, or something in between, using this card:

V198. Claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled

V199. Avoiding a fare on public transport

V200. Cheating on taxes if you have a chance

V201. Someone accepting a bribe in the course of their duties

V202. Homosexuality

V203. Prostitution

V204. Abortion

V205. Divorce

V206. Euthanasia: ending the life of the incurably sick

V207. Suicide

All these items are answered on a Likert-type scale from 1 (never justifiable) to 10 (always justifiable).

We noted that Slovenia exhibited some very unusual response patterns in 2005-2008. For example, unlike the respondents in any other country in the WVS, absolutely all Slovenes avoided the first four positions on the illegal-dishonest items. Therefore, we excluded Slovenia from our analysis. The remaining dataset consisted of 54 countries. Yet because some countries were not represented on all items, some of the multi-item analyses were performed across fewer countries.

We factor-analyzed the 10 MDBS items as measured in 2005-2008 at the national level and obtained factor scores. To estimate their temporal stability, we also factor-analyzed the 10 corresponding MDBS items measured a decade earlier in the 1995-1998 WVS wave. Then, we obtained correlations between the two pairs of factor scores.

To validate the two subscales that the MDBS items yield—personal-sexual and illegal dishonest—we produced separate multidimensional scaling (MDS) maps for each of the two subscales. The maps allow visual estimates of proximities between countries and identification of cultural clusters. We followed Inglehart and Baker’s (2000) approach: Instead of relying on statistical clustering techniques, we attempted to identify previously reported cultural clusters, such as those in Inglehart and Baker (2000) or House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, and Gupta (2004).

For both MDS maps, we used Euclidian distances after z score standardization by case, also known as within-subject standardization (Fischer, 2004). Thus, we followed the example of Smith, Trompenaars, and Dugan (1995), who used the same type of standardization in their country-level MDS analysis. The resulting ipsatization of the raw scores reveals the relative strength of each participant’s (in our case, each country’s) endorsement of each item. Assessing this relative strength is not central to our study, yet we found that this ipsatization produces the most clearly interpretable MDS country maps for both subscales.

Finally, we attempted to validate the factors yielded by the MDBS items by correlating them with geographic and economic variables as well as reported dimensions of national culture. For our selection of cultural dimensions, we used Minkov (2013). This publication contains presentations and brief reviews of 26 large-scale cross-cultural studies in peer-reviewed journals and monographs that have reported national indices reflecting differences in culture and personality. We chose only the studies that report dimensions based on values and beliefs (social axioms) as these would be viewed as uncontroversial measures of national culture as opposed to indices that reflect national differences in personality, organizational behavior, culturally endorsed leadership styles, and so forth. Our final list included the dimensions reported by Bond et al. (2004), the Chinese Culture Connection (1987), Hofstede (2001), Inglehart and Norris (2003), Minkov (2011), and Schwartz (1994). We added the tightness dimension by Gelfand et al. (2011) to this list, as it is clearly relevant to our analysis.

Results

The ecological factor analysis (principal components with varimax rotation) of the 10 MDBS items as measured in 2005-2008 yielded two clearly delineated factors as in Vauclair and Fischer’s (2011) individual-level analysis: personal-sexual and illegal-dishonest. Since a country map with these two factors as axes showed that Serbia was an outlier, we dropped that country and repeated the factor analysis without it. This time, the personal-sexual factor had an eigenvalue of 5.16, explaining 51.6% of the total variance, and was defined by homosexuality (.96), abortion (.95), divorce (.94), euthanasia (.92), suicide (.90), and prostitution (.87). The illegal-dishonest factor had an eigenvalue of 3.25, explaining 32.5% of variance. It was defined by bribing (.92), avoiding fares (.90), tax evasion (.89), and claiming benefits (.83). There were no sizeable cross-loadings on the two factors.

We also factor-analyzed the 1995-1998 measures of the same MDBS items. After varimax rotation, we obtained two very similar factors, without sizeable cross-loadings: The personal-sexual factor had an eigenvalue of 4.45, explaining 44.5% of the total variance, and was defined by suicide (.92), divorce (.92), euthanasia (.85), homosexuality (.84), prostitution (.82), and abortion (.78). The illegal-dishonest factor had an eigenvalue of 2.57, explaining 25.7% of variance. It was defined by tax evasion (.86), avoiding fares (.84), bribing (.72), and claiming benefits (.70).

To estimate the temporal stability of the two factors, we correlated the 2005-2008 factor scores with their analogues from 1995-1998 and obtained the following correlations across 25 overlapping countries:

personal-sexual .85 (p <.001)

illegal-dishonest .63 (p =.001).

Thus, the two measures of the personal-sexual factors share about two thirds of variance. Consequently, the factor remained fairly stable over a decade. The two measures of the illegal-dishonest factor share a little more than one third of variance. Consequently, this factor is fairly unstable.

To show country positions on the two sets of factor scores from 2005-2008 (multiplied by 100), we created a two-dimensional country map with the two factors as axes. It is presented in Figure 1. The map allows visual estimates of geographic or economic regularities and proximities between countries on the two factors.

Figure 1.

Country Positions on Factor 1 (Personal-Sexual) and Factor 2 (Illegal-Dishonest)

Finally, we used MDS to scale the six personal-sexual items and then (separately) the four illegal-dishonest items from 2005-2008. The MDS solution for the six personal-sexual items had a stress value of .13. This makes it acceptable as the number of scaled items (49) exceeds the number of dimensions (2) far more than fourfold (Borg & Groenen, 2005). The solution for the four illegal-dishonest items had a stress value of .06. The two MDS country maps are presented in Figures 2 and 3. In Figure 2, we have outlined unambiguous cultural zones. We did not do that in Figure 3, as the cultural configurations there are much vaguer.

Figure 2.

Multidimensional Scaling Plot of 49 Countries on the Six Items That Define the Personal-Sexual Factor.

Figure 3.

Multidimensional Scaling Plot of 49 Countries on the Four Items That Define the Illegal-Dishonest Factor.

The clarity of the cultural zones in Figure 2 suggested that we can expect high correlations between the personal-sexual factor and geographic and economic variables. The lack of such clarity in Figure 3 suggested that no such correlations would emerge. Table 1 provides correlations with relevant economic and geographic variables.

Table 1.

Pearson Correlations Between Factor 1 (Personal-Sexual), Factor 2 (Illegal-Dishonest), GNI Per Person, and Geographic Variables.

Variable	Correlation With Factor 1: Personal-Sexual	Correlation With Factor 2: Illegal-Dishonest
UN Statistics Division (2008)
GDP per person in 2007	.78** (n = 48)	-.37**
Van de Vliert (2009)
Harshness of winters	.45** (n = 49)	-.33*
Harshness of summers	-.12 (n = 49)	.28
CIA (2012)
Average (centroid) distance from Equator	.56** (n = 49)	-.33*
Average (centroid) distance from Greenwich	-.19 (n = 49)	-.03

p < .05. **p < .01.

The results show that the personal-sexual factor is strongly associated with national wealth and to a lower extent with geographic variables. The illegal dishonest factor also yields significant correlations with the same variables, but their magnitudes are considerably lower.

The personal-sexual factor yielded high positive associations with all national indices that reflect differences in various aspects of conservatism or collectivism. The illegal-dishonest factor was most closely correlated with power distance (positively) and integration (negatively, suggesting low concern for solidarity and noncompetitiveness). The results are presented in Table 2.

Table 2.

Pearson Correlations Between Factor 1 (Personal-Sexual), Factor 2 (Illegal-Dishonest), and Cultural Dimensions.

Dimension of National Culture	Correlation With Factor 1: Personal-Sexual	Correlation With Factor 2: Illegal-Dishonest
Schwartz (1994)
Conservatism	-.75** (n = 20)	.28
Affective autonomy	.72** (n = 20)	-.08
Hierarchy	-.69** (n = 20)	.04
Intellectual autonomy	.66** (n = 20)	-.25
Egalitarian commitment	.61** (n = 20)	-.35
Harmony	.31 (n = 20)	-.21
Mastery	-.32 (n = 20)	.19
Hofstede (2001)
Individualism	.69** (n = 32)	-.38**
Power distance	-.65** (n = 32)	.59**
Uncertainty avoidance	-.12 (n = 32)	.02
Masculinity	-.12 (n = 32)	-.12
Inglehart and Norris (2003)
Self-expression values	.71** (n = 37)	-.26
Secular values	.52** (n = 37)	-.14
Bond et al. (2004)
Dynamic externality	-.71** (n = 26)	.35
Societal cynicism	-.32 (n = 26)	.05
Chinese Culture Connection (1987)
Confucian work dynamism	-.67** (n = 17)	.09
Integration	-.64** (n = 16)	-.55*
Moral discipline	-.55** (n = 16)	.00
Human heartedness	-.20 (n = 16)	-.18
Minkov (2011)
Exclusionism versus universalism	-.83** (n = 46)	.40**
Industry versus indulgence	-.72** (n = 35)	.12
Monumentalism	-.49** (n = 35)	-.01
Hypometropia	-.17 (n = 40)	.38*
Gelfand et al. (2011)
Tightness	-.31 (n = 21)	.10

p < .05. **p < .01.

Discussion

Our nation-level analysis of the 10 MDBS items in the WVS produced two factors that are structurally similar to those extracted by Vauclair and Fischer (2011) at the individual level. The personal-sexual factor is characterized by relative temporal stability and creates fairly clear geo-economic configurations of countries. It is also strongly associated with dimensions of national culture, mostly those that tap aspects of conservatism and collectivism. The personal-sexual factor clearly reflects a dimension of national culture.

The illegal-dishonest factor is less stable and does not create very clear geo-economic configurations. Also, it yields lower correlations with dimensions of national culture. This suggests that the cultural element in it is diluted by, or mixed with, noncultural factors.

Weak as it is, the cultural element in the illegal-dishonest factor deserves some attention. That factor yields a positive correlation with power distance and a negative one with integration. According to the theory associated with the power distance dimension (Hofstede, 1980, 2001; Hofstede et al., 2010), powers-that-be in high-scoring countries often feel exempted from accountability to the citizens. In return, the powerless adopt either dependent or counterdependent (rebellious) attitudes toward their leaders, one of which may be justification of illegal-dishonest behaviors in dealings with the government. The association with the integration dimension means that societies that are more likely to accept illegal-dishonest practices attach a lower importance to a set of values that include social solidarity and noncompetitiveness.

Despite the apparent logic of these interpretations, the modest correlations that we obtained suggest a need for caution. Besides, the association between the illegal-dishonest factor and integration is based on a very small number of overlapping cases and is significant only at the .05 level. Furthermore, the association with power distance suggests that the developing countries in the WVS that score low on the illegal-dishonest factor should have low power distance scores. Yet although we lack power distance scores for many of the developing countries in the 2005-2008 wave, it is quite implausible to expect low power distance anywhere in the Middle East or Asia. Thus, the correlation between power distance and the illegal-dishonest factor may be a statistical artifact, stemming from an unrepresentative sample of common cases.

The personal-sexual factor contrasts the rich countries and the developing ones, much like many previously reported dimensions of national culture, and is therefore logically associated with distance from the equator. Also, the items that define it produce clear cultural clusters—African, Latin-American, West European, Anglo, East European, and Confucian—as well as two pairs of related cultures—Malay-Indonesian and Turkish-Iranian. The illegal-dishonest factor is not strongly associated with national wealth or geographic location. The country configurations that it creates are not quite clear.

Considering the whole evidence in our analysis, we conclude that the personal-sexual factor reflects cultural phenomena and represents a legitimate dimension of national culture, much like the existing measures of collectivism or conservatism. It can be used as a promising alternative to value-based dimensions in order to unpackage culture. The illegal-dishonest factor has a cultural element in it, but it is diluted and contaminated with noncultural ingredients.

Our findings contribute a new perspective on the theory of tightness-looseness. Despite Gelfand et al.’s (2006) conceptualization of that dimension as independent of individualism-collectivism, we have found that precisely individualism-collectivism and other similar dimensions account for the acceptability of deviations from some of the most important societal norms seen from an evolutionary perspective: those associated with procreation and preservation of life. Tolerance of deviations from behavioral norms in this domain is lower in poorer countries where individuals are less likely to be allowed to make individual decisions but are expected to conform to societal norms, coinciding with the values of the majority. Thus, the cultures of the poor countries are tight in this particular respect, whereas those of the rich countries are loose.

Our study brings up an important question. Why does Gelfand et al.’s (2011) tightness-looseness yield such low and insignificant correlations with the two MDBS dimensions? It is impossible to give a reliable answer to this question without a special study. Yet we will venture some hypotheses. First, it is not clear what Gelfand et al.’s respondents had in mind when they answered questions such as “In this country if someone acts in an inappropriate way, others will strongly disapprove” (p. 1102)? It is likely that most WVS respondents from all over the world have more or less the same concept of suicide, abortion, homosexuality, and prostitution. But when they are asked to report on the acceptability of inappropriate behavior, do people from all countries have the same behavior in mind? It is likely that they do not. If this is so, Gelfand et al.’s measure reflects discordant reports of emic phenomena that cannot be used for etic and nomothetic cross-cultural comparisons.

Alternatively, it is possible that Gelfand et al.’s respondents did have similar behaviors in mind as tightness correlates with their “situational constraint measure” (p. 1103), capturing the appropriateness of arguing, eating, laughing, cursing, and other similar behaviors in a variety of public contexts. If this is so, tightness is radically different from the two MDBS dimensions as it is mostly about good versus bad manners, whereas the MDBS dimensions reflect crucially important societal norms about procreation, life, death, and citizens’ cooperation with the government.

These reflections on the tightness dimension evoke a parallel with the illegal-dishonest dimension. One potential reason that it is not a stable dimension of national culture, producing clear country configurations, may be that respondents in different countries do not interpret all the items in the same way. We can only wonder if the average Bulgarian, Malaysian, and American have the same thing in mind when they hear the phrase “claiming government benefits.” As Rokkan, Verba, Viet, and Almasy (1969) put it, “the questions an interviewer asks suddenly propel the respondent into a world of thought he never had. He may find the questions incomprehensible and throw up his hands or he may respond with spontaneous thoughts about politics that did not exist before the question was asked” (p. 75). It is possible that many people in some countries have little experience with government benefits of any kind or with tax evasion, since their taxes are paid by their employers. It is also possible that they have never given any thought to, and consequently cannot grasp, the social and economic consequences of bribing. Furthermore, people’s attitudes toward the MDBS illegal-dishonest behaviors may change as a function of government policies, the economic situation, and other situational factors. Thus, the illegal-dishonest dimension may contain an emic element that makes it a controversial tool for etic cross-cultural comparisons.

We concur with Vauclair and Fischer (2011) that attitudes toward deviations from norms do not form a unitary phenomenon, either at the individual level or the ecological. Therefore, if researchers ask abstract question about the acceptability of deviations from norms in general, the result will be an abstract answer obfuscating an important fact shown by Vauclair and Fischer and by our study: The acceptability of deviations from societal norms depends on what the norm is about.

Our findings have implications for researchers of cultural differences:

If researchers measure societal norms or the strength of those norms, hoping to obtain dimensions of national culture, they should ensure that their measures reflect stable cultural dispositions rather than volatile moods.

Researchers of cultural differences in norms should ask specific questions about specific norms rather than abstract questions.

Researchers of cultural differences in norms should ensure that their items are well understood, and mean the same thing, in all cultural environments under study.

Footnotes

Appendix

Abbreviations of Country Names

ANDR	Andorra
ARGN	Argentina
AUST	Australia
BRAZ	Brazil
BRIT	United Kingdom
BULG	Bulgaria
BURK	Burkina Faso
CHIL	Chile
CHIN	China
CYPR	Cyprus
EAST	Former East Germany
ETHI	Ethiopia
FINL	Finland
FRAN	France
GERM	Germany
HONG	Hong Kong
INDI	India
INDN	Indonesia
IRAN	Iran
ITAL	Italy
JAPN	Japan
JORD	Jordan
KORE	South Korea
MALI	Mali
MALA	Malaysia
MEXC	Mexico
MOLD	Moldova
NETH	Netherlands
NEWZ	New Zealand
POLN	Poland
ROMN	Romania
RUSS	Russia
RWAN	Rwanda
SAFR	South Africa
SPAI	Spain
SWED	Sweden
SWIT	Switzerland
TAIW	Taiwan
THAI	Thailand
TRIN	Trinidad
TURK	Turkey
UKRN	Ukraine
USA	United States
VIET	Vietnam
ZAMB	Zambia

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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