Cross-Cultural Research Methods

J. R. Baloloy, Ph.D., RPsy.

Divine Word College of Legazpi

Types of
Cross-Cultural
Research

Types of Cross-Cultural Research

• Method Validation Studies
• Validity - The degree to which a finding, measurement, or statistics is
accurate, or represents what it’s supposed to.
• Reliability - The degree to which a finding, measurement, or statistic is
consistent.
• Cross-Cultural Validation Studies - A study that examines whether a
measure of a psychological construct that was originally generated in a
single culture is applicable, meaningful, and thus equivalent in another
culture.
 Types of Cross-Cultural Research
• Indigenous Cultural Studies
• Studies that use rich, complex, and in-depth descriptions of cultures and
cultural differences to predict and test for differences in a psychological
variable.

Types of Cross-Cultural Research

• Cross Cultural Comparisons
• A study that compares two or more cultures on some psychological variable
of interest, often with the hypothesis that one culture will have significantly
higher scores on the variable than the other(s).

Types of Cross-Cultural Comparisons

 Example of Data from an Individual-Level Study

Example of Data from an Ecological-Level Study

Designing Cross-Cultural
Comparative Research
Cross-Cultural Research
Methods
How do we design a good cross-cultural research?
• Getting the right research question

How do we design a good cross-cultural research?

• Linkage Studies - Design that establish linkages between culture and
psychological variables:
• Unpacking Studies
• Self-Construal Scales
• Personality
• Cultural Practices
• Experiments

How do we design a good cross-cultural research?

• Linkage Studies - Design that establish linkages between culture and
psychological variables:
• Unpacking Studies
• Studies that unpackage the contents of the global, unspecific concept of
culture into specific, measurable psychological constructs and examine
their contribution to cultural differences.
• Uses individual-level measures of culture
• E.g. idiocentrism and allocentrism
How do we design a good cross-cultural research?
• Linkage Studies - Design that establish linkages between culture and
psychological variables:
• Unpacking Studies
• Self-Construal Scales
• Using scales measured on an individual level, where individual differences
can be linked to cultural differences

How do we design a good cross-cultural research?

• Linkage Studies - Design that establish linkages between culture and
psychological variables:
• Unpacking Studies
• Self-Construal Scales
• Personality
• Cultural differences may be explained by different levels of personality
traits in each culture.

How do we design a good cross-cultural research?

• Linkage Studies - Design that establish linkages between culture and
psychological variables:
• Unpacking Studies
• Self-Construal Scales
• Personality
• Cultural Practices
• Assess cultural practices such as child-rearing, the nature of interpersonal
relationships, or cultural worldviews
How do we design a good cross-cultural research?
• Linkage Studies - Design that establish linkages between culture and
psychological variables:
• Unpacking Studies
• Self-Construal Scales
• Personality
• Cultural Practices
• Experiments
• Conditions to establish cause–effect relationships.

How do we design a good cross-cultural research?

• Types of Experiments in Cross-Cultural Research
• Priming Studies - involve experimentally manipulating the mindsets of
participants and measuring the resulting changes in behavior.
• Behavioral Studies - experiments involving manipulations of actual
environments and the observation of changes in behaviors as a function of
these environments.

Bias and
Equivalence
Cross-Cultural Research
Methods
 Types of Bias

Socially desirable responding

Acquiescence bias
Extreme response bias
Reference group effect

What to do when data is non-equivalent

• Preclude comparison. The most conservative thing a researcher could do is not
make the comparison in the first place, concluding that it would be meaningless.
• Reduce the nonequivalence in the data. Take steps to identify equivalent and
nonequivalent parts of the methods and then refocus the comparisons solely on
the equivalent parts.
• Interpret the nonequivalence. A third strategy is for the researcher to interpret
the nonequivalence as an important piece of information concerning cultural
differences.
• Ignore the nonequivalence.

When we interpret data wrong

• Cultural Attribution Fallacies - A mistaken interpretation in crosscultural
comparison studies. Cultural attribution fallacies occur when researchers infer
that something cultural produced the differences they observed in their study,
despite the fact that they may not be empirically justified in doing so because
they did not actually measure those cultural factors.