Abstract
When I became Editor in Chief of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (JCCP) in 2012, following the suggestion of Fons van de Vijver, who had been a previous Editor in Chief of JCCP and was the Chair of the IACCP Publication Committee, I decided to have an invited paper to begin each new year of JCCP. For the first of these papers, as a developmental psychologist, I chose a central developmental topic—attachment. I invited my dear friend and colleague, Heidi Keller, to review the attachment literature and to highlight the role of culture which had often been ignored. Her review paper has become a classic in the field. Across the years, I expanded these opening-year papers to include submitted papers, and I would enlarge discussion of them by inviting noted scholars to provide commentaries about the paper. One of these papers was a provocative conceptual paper submitted by Shalom Schwartz that examined what culture is and how we define it, and it was enhanced with a stimulating discussion in JCCP led by Chi-Yue Chiu, with commentaries from Michael Morris, Ching Wan, Toshio Yamagishi, and Patricia Greenfield.
As I am stepping down from serving as the Editor in Chief of JCCP, it is only fitting to present JCCP readers with another thought-provoking paper, again from my area of developmental psychology that deals with a fundamental developmental topic, parenting. Gao-Xian Lin and 76 colleagues collected data using open-ended questions to explore ideal-parent beliefs with 8,357 mothers and 3,517 fathers in 37 countries. Using Leximancer Semantic Network Analysis they identified five “parenting culture zones” (countries that shared ideal-parent beliefs) and determined predominant themes and concepts in each culture zone. The commentaries from Sara Harkness, Vaishali Raval, and Gisela Trommsdorff that follow expand discussion of this important cross-cultural topic.