Few notes on conducting cultural comparisons in psychological research

• Main Author: Václav Linkov
• Format: Article
• Language: ces
• Published: University of Ostrava 2014-12-01
• Series: Psychology and its Contexts
• Subjects: cultural comparison in psychology; measuring; social dimension of research
• Online Access: http://psychkont.osu.cz/fulltext/2014/Linkov_2014_2.pdf

Some problems of conducting cultural comparisons in psychological research are mentioned. First, the constructs and methods used often don't tell anything meaningful about cultures in question - as if we used temperature (construct) and thermomether (method) to compare water and nitrogen. Often, method developed to measure construct meaningful in culture A (or construct meaningful for comparison between culture A and other cultures) is used to compare cultures B and C. As a result, the used method might measure something, which is relevant only for some of the compared cultures, or is not meaningful for such cultural comparison at all - cultures B and C might look similar when construct meaningful for description of difference between cultures A and D is used. Second, groups not being represented in academia in countries in question (often indigenous groups in these countries) are often omitted from research. Researchers from some countries might be motivated to don't mention such groups in the published research. Third, researchers often generalize developed constructs and results to larger groups than they have actually knowledge and understanding about. Chauvinist idea that one's own culture is representative for geographically close cultures might be behind this behavior as well as pragmatic idea that the research stating its results to be valid for larger group of people has larger chance to be published. Fourth, constructs and methods developed by these types of research are published in psychological journals, which ignore these issues. Before preparing a cultural-comparative research it is recommended to get good knowledge about cultures in question and use this knowledge to judge meaningfulness of constructs used in psychological research. If there are no meaningful constructs for description of differences between cultures in question, it is better to develop a new construct.