Cross-Cultural Research

A cultural syndrome can be identified when shared attitudes, be liefs, norms, roles, values, and other such elements of subjective cul ture, identified among those who share a language, historic period, and geographic location, (a) are organized around a theme, (b) there is evidence that the within-culture variance of these constructs is small relative to the between-cultures variance, and (c) there is a link between these patterns of subjective culture and geography. This article reviews evidence suggesting that the collectivism and individualism constructs are cultural syndromes.

To determine cross-cultural variations in associative meaning, 389 males and females in Germany, Russia, and the United States rated nouns for their degree of association with the concepts of jealousy, envy, anger, and fear. The findings touched on several issues. Re garding the conceptual distinction between jealousy and envy, the associations overlapped strongly in the United States, somewhat in Germany, and not at all in Russia. In agreement with scholars who posit that jealousy is a combination of anger and fear, we found that jealousy overlapped with anger in three nations and with fear in two nations. But the overlap was far less than that between anger and fear. Evidence for the proposal that anger and fear are more firmly rooted in the biological heritage of human beings than are jealousy and envy was inconclusive. Predictions drawn from tax onomy and prototype models that anger, envy, and jealousy would have similar associations but that each emotion would differ from fear were not supported.

Various features of the family have been argued to be universal among the world's societies. These include marriage and the family itself, male dominance and the division of labor by sex, incest taboos and exogamy, and the distinction between legitimate and illegiti mate birth. Each of these features except illegitimacy has a long history of theoretical and comparative investigation. The author argues that illegitimacy underlies each of the other family univer sals, in the sense that it is a given in their theoretical accounts. Hence it is more basic to family and kinship, and more primordial, than the others. Theoretical and comparative work on illegitimacy as a social norm and value is sorely needed, for without understand ing illegitimacy in this way, we cannot fully account for the other purported universal features of the family.

Naturalistic observation plays an important role in cross-cultural research, and in virtually all cases observations are made of popu lation samples, not whole populations. A variety of sampling strat egies have been devised for naturalistic fieldwork, but deviations from actual target populations differ widely depending on the strategy used. This study uses two sets of continuous observations of child touching behavior to empirically evaluate these various sampling strategies. We find that random samples are the only ones that reliably represent the target populations. This finding has a number of implications for cross-cultural research, primarily that (a) data collected using differing sampling techniques are likely to vary in their representativeness, making samples gathered with different techniques difficult to compare; and (b) because the repre sentativeness of any sample is partly a function of the nature of the target population, careful attention should be paid to the definition of target populations.

Using data from three well-known cross-cultural survey data sets that differ in size and geographical scope, this article examines the effects of spatial and/or cultural clustering of societies on the usual chi-square test of independence. Sample design effects for individ ual variables and for two-way contingency tables from all three data sets were found to be generally larger than unity, often consid erably so, suggesting that the associated chi-square test statistic var iances are considerably underestimated and that the risk of Type I errors is considerably greater than the 5% level usually assumed by researchers. This is especially true if variable categories have been collapsed to overcome small cell counts, a common occurrence in comparative research. These empirical findings imply that using chi-square tests with categorical variables from cross-cultural sur vey data sets is a relatively easy way to generate an excess of sta tistically significant results, thus increasing the likelihood of "sav ing the theory." The results also strongly suggest that the extensive reporting of naive chi-square independence tests using cross- cultural data sets over the past several decades has led to incorrect rejection of null hypotheses at levels much higher than the expected 5% rate. A reanalysis of chi-square-based inferences from a pre viously published study also supports this conclusion. A deflation factor is proposed for observed chi-squares that reduces the Type I error rates closer to the assumed levels.