Cultural psychology
Chapter 4
Methods for studying culture and psychology

Considerations for conducting research across cultures

The problem for cultural psychologists is that not only do they inherit the standard ambiguities of whatever methods they adopt from other subfields, but many of these methods create further ambiguities when applied to the study of people from other cultures.

What cultures should we study?

In general, it’s not recommended to randomly select cultures to study. Interpreting the results can be very difficult if there is no theory guiding the selection of cultures.

One common approach for selecting cultures is to choose samples based on a theoretical variable that you are investigating.

Sometimes you might want to explore the degree of universality of a particular psychological finding. A good first step would be to select two cultures that vary greatly on as many theoretical relevant dimensions as possible. If a similarity is found in a particular psychological process between two cultures that are maximally different, this would be compelling evidence for a high degree of universality for that process.

Making meaningful comparisons across cultures

After one has selected the cultures to study, it is critical that the researcher design a study so that the results can be meaningfully interpreted.  

The importance of developing knowledge about the cultures under study

Cultural psychologists are often studying people from a different culture, and it is not always clear how much the researcher’s own experiences would generalize to the people she is studying. An important initial step in studying people from other cultures is to learn something about the culture under study.

One can learn about another culture in a variety of ways: 1)  Read existing texts and ethnographies about the culture. Ethographies usually contain rich descriptions of a culture, or a particular situation or group of people within a culture, derived from extensive observation and interaction by an anthropologists 2) Find a collaborator who is from the culture you are studying and who is interested in pursuing the same research with you 3) Immerse oneself in another culture to learn it firsthand.

Contrasting highly different cultures versus similar cultures

There are culturally learned skills, also regarding completing surveys. It is meaningless to compare responses on surveys from people who have an understanding of how surveys work and those who don’t.

if we are to take meaningful comparisons across cultures, our participants must understand our questions or situations in equivalent ways. Methodological equivalence means having one’s methods perceived in identical ways across different cultures. A variety of statistical techniques are applied in cross-cultural studies of survey data to increase equivalence.

When the cultures are not comparably familiar with the research setting, ensuring methodological equivalence is a more challenging endeavour. We have to adapt our procedures so that they are understandable in each culture we study, which sometimes results in using slightly different procedures in each culture. Some experimental control is lost when we use different procedures.

Generalizability means that findings generalize to populations other than the samples that you study. Power refers to the capability of a study to detect an effect to the extent that such an effect really exists.

Conducting cross-cultural research with surveys

One of the most common ways of conducting cross-cultural research is to use surveys.

Challenges to conducting survey research across cultures are: 1) Translation 2) Various types of response biases 3) Reference-group effects 4) Deprivation effects

Translation of questionnaire items

One potential solution to a language barrier is to keep all of your materials in the original language, and study only people who are bilingual.

Problems with using only bilinguals are: 1) The participants will likely have poorer English skills than your translators. The data would be meaningless if the participants did not have the requisite language skills to understand the questions 2) One has to be concerned about whether those in a culture who have good English capabilities are representative of their cultures 3) The language we’re thinking in can greatly affect the way we’re thinking.

Another solution is to translate the materials. But, translating psychological materials is not easy, many psychological terms do not have equivalents in other languages.

Having an accurate translation of your psychological materials is a necessary precondition for doing good cross-cultural research. To ensure a good translation it is possible to: 1) Make sure that at least one of the primary investigators on a project is fully bilingual in the languages that are being compared 2)Sometimes, the researcher is somewhat at the mercy of translators. Back-translation method means that you translate terms to another language and back. A problem with this is that it might result in a very unnatural or hard-to-understand translation, even though the literal meaning is preserved

Response biases

What people are thinking and how they answer a survey question might not be exactly the same because of response biases. Response biases are factors that distort the accuracy of a person’s responses to surveys. They become especially problematic when comparing groups that differ in their response biases. Like socially desirable responding.

Moderacy and extremity biases

Often, psychological materials present participants with statements, and the participants indicate their agreement by choosing a number from a scale. There is a tendency for people from different cultures to vary in terms of how likely they are to express their agreement in a moderate fashion or in an extreme fashion.

Moderacy and extremity biases affect how an individual responds to an item independent of the content of the item.

Moderacy and extremity biases can be controlled for in certain situations: 1) Avoid providing participants with a set of responses that has a middle answer 2) Standardizing data before conducting cross-cultural comparisons. Each participant’s scores are first averaged, and then the individual items are assessed with respect to how much they deviate from the participant’s personal average. This indicates how participants respond to each item compared to their typical way of responding. But, standardizing assumes that the average level of response is identical across cultures. With this, you cannot compare the average level of responses.

Acquiescence bias

An acquiescence bias is a tendency to agree with most statements. Cultures differ in their tendencies to agree with items.

A solution to the acquiescence bias is that half the items in a measure are designed to be reverse-scored. Alternatively, standardizing the data would also neutralize acquiescence biases.

Reference-group effects

People in different cultures use different standards to answer questions. People tend to evaluate themselves by comparing themselves with others, mostly to most other people around us. People from different cultures tend to compare themselves to different reference groups, and thus to different standards.

One technique for correcting the problems associated with the reference-group effect is to avoid subjective measures that might have different standards in the groups being compared. One is often better of using more concrete measures. The more concrete the scenario, the less likely it is that people from different cultures would interpret the meaning differently. But, they also tend to be more specific.

You could also make questions more concrete by altering the response format. Some response formats are subjective, like ‘strongly agree’. It can be made objective, for example ‘at least once a day’.

Some kind of measures are protected from reference-group effects. For example, behavioural measures and physiological measures.

Deprivation effects

Consider what people actually have in contrast to what they would like to have.

An issue for measuring values across cultures is that we might expect that in cultures where there is chronically less of something, people express valuing it more. This is the deprivation effect.

Self-report work fine within cultures because cultural members tend to share the same response biases and reference groups. They don’t work well between cultures.

Conducting cross-cultural research with experiments

Much psychological research in cultural psychology employs the experimental method. The experimental method involves the manipulation of an independent variable and measurement of the influence that this manipulation has on a dependent variable. All other extraneous influences can be held constant.

In cross-cultural studies, cultural background is not manipulated. This means that comparisons of cultures are quasi-experiments.

Two kinds of manipulations of independent variables can be performed in psychological research are: 1) Between-group manipulation, different groups of participants receive different levels of the independent variable 2) Within-group manipulation, each participant receives more than one level of the independent variable. Each participant is assigned to all of the conditions in different orders.

Manipulating independent variables in cultural research can provide us with a comparison that is not limited by the response biases associated with questionnaire research. The experimental method changes our between-culture comparison from one of comparing the magnitude of means across cultures, to one of comparing the pattern of means across cultures.

Neuroscience methods

There has been a tremendous amount of recent research in the incipient field of cultural neuroscience that has used various kinds of neuroscience methods to understand how neural events vary alongside cultural traits.

Some methods particular to the study of culture

Situation sampling

Situation sampling utilizes the fact that cultures do not affect people in the abstract, they affect people in particular, concrete ways. The ways in which cultures affect us is that they provide us with particular kinds of situations that we encounter on a regular basis. It is our experiences in these culturally shaped situations that lead us to adopt habitual ways of thinking about ourselves and our worlds.

The underlying idea of the situation sampling methodology is that if researchers can see how people respond to situations that are regularly experienced by people in another culture, they can get a viewpoint into how cultures shape people’s ways of thinking. It involves two-steps: 1) Participants from at least two cultures are asked to describe a number of situations that have experiences in which something specific happened 2) Different groups of participants are asked to participate in the study. This set of participants is provided with a list of situations that have been generated by the first set of participants (of both cultures), and they are asked to imagine how they would have felt if they had been in those situations themselves.

This methodology allows for a couple of kinds of analyses: 1) Whether there are differences in the ways people from different cultures respond to the situations. 2) Explore whether the cultural origin of the situations that participants listed are responded to differently participants in the second step.

Cultural priming

Cultural priming works by making certain ideas more accessible to participants, and to the extent that those ideas are associated with cultural meaning systems. We can investigate what happens when people start to think about certain cultural ideas.

Culture-level measures

Cultural data should be similar in nature to those of psychological hypothesis testing in that they should be objective and capable of being replicated by others and quantifiable so that we can conduct statistical analyses to determine whether our hypothesis are supported.

Cultural psychologists have used such empirical methods to investigate the kinds of cultural messages to which individuals are habitually exposed.

The challenge of unpackaging

Unpacking cultural findings means identifying the underlying variables that give rise to the cultural difference. 1) Let a theory guide the researchers’ search for potential underlying cultural variables. 2) Check if the underlying variable really differs 3) Demonstrate that the observed cultural difference relates to the underlying variable.

Conducting cross-cultural research with multiple methods

A more compelling case is always made when researchers utilize multiple methods in their research.