Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called holocultural studiesorcomparative studies, is a specialization in anthropology and sister sciences such as sociology, psychology, economics, political science that uses field data from many societies through comparative research to examine the scope of human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and culture.
Cross-cultural studies is the third form of cross-cultural comparisons. The first is comparison of case studies, the second is controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation, and the third is comparison within a sample of cases.[1] Unlike comparative studies, which examines similar characteristics of a few societies, cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample so that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between the traits in question.[2] These studies are surveys of ethnographic data, or involve qualitative data collection.[3]
Cross-cultural studies are applied widely in the social sciences, particularly in cultural anthropology and psychology.
The first cross-cultural studies were carried out by 19th-century anthropologists such as Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan. One of Edward Tylor's first studies gave rise to the central statistical issue of cross-cultural studies: phylogenetic autocorrelation also known as Galton's problem.[4] In the recent decades[when?] historians and particularly historians of science started looking at the mechanism and networks by which knowledge, ideas, skills, instruments and books moved across cultures, generating new and fresh concepts concerning the order of things in nature. In Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean 1560–1660 Avner Ben-Zaken has argued that cross-cultural exchanges take place at a cultural hazy locus where the margins of one culture overlaps the other, creating a "mutually embraced zone" where exchanges take place on mundane ways. From such a stimulating zone, ideas, styles, instruments and practices move onward to the cultural centers, urging them to renew and update cultural notions.[5]
The modern era of cross-cultural studies began with George Murdock (1949),[6] who set up a number of foundational data sets, including the Human Relations Area Files, and the Ethnographic Atlas. Together with Douglas R. White, he developed the widely-used Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, which is currently maintained by the open access electronic journal World Cultures.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is a framework for cross-cultural communication, developed by Geert Hofstede in the 1970s. It describes the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behavior, using a structure derived from factor analysis.[7] The original theory proposed four dimensions along which cultural values could be analyzed: individualism-collectivism; uncertainty avoidance; power distance (strength of social hierarchy) and masculinity-femininity (task-orientation versus person-orientation). It has been refined several times since then.[8]
With the widespread access of people to the Internet and the high influence of online social networks on daily life, users behavior in these websites have become a new resource to perform cross-cultural and comparative studies. A study on Twitter examined the usage of emoticons from users of 78 countries and found a positive correlation between individualism-collectivism dimension of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory and people's use of mouth-oriented emoticons.[9] Another user experience study on the usage of smileys from users of 12 countries showed that emoji-based scales may ease the challenges related to translation and implementation for brief cross-cultural surveys.[10]
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