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]
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]
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]
^Avner Ben-Zaken, "From "Incommensurability of Cultures" to Mutually Embraced Zones" in Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges In the Eastern Mediterranean 1560–1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)], pp. 163–167.
ISBN9780801894763
^Park, Jaram; Baek, Young Min;
Cha, Meeyoung (2014-03-19). "Cross-Cultural Comparison of Nonverbal Cues in Emoticons on Twitter: Evidence from Big Data Analysis". Journal of Communication. 64 (2): 333–354.
doi:
10.1111/jcom.12086.
ISSN0021-9916.
Ember, Carol R., and
Melvin Ember. 1998. Cross-Cultural Research. Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology / Ed. by H. R. Bernard, pp. 647–90. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Ember, Carol R., and
Melvin Ember. 2001. Cross-Cultural Research Methods. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Franco, F.M., and D. Narasimhan. 2009. Plant names and uses as indicators of
traditional knowledge. Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge.
[1]
Franco, F.M., D. Narasimhan and W. Stanley. 2008. Relationship between four tribal communities and their natural resources in the Koraput region. Ethnobotany Research and Applications, Vol. 6.
[2]
Levinson, David, and Martin J. Malone. 1980. Toward Explaining Human Culture: A Critical Review of the Findings of Worldwide Cross-Cultural Research. New Haven, CT:
HRAF Press.
Macfarlane, Alan. 2004.
To Contrast and Compare, pp. 94–111, in Methodology and Fieldwork, edited by Vinay Kumar Srivastava. Delhi: Oxford University Press.