Comparative analysis of english and american romanticism

II. Main part
Types of Cross-Cultural Studies
The Argentinean author Jorge Borges once proposed a taxonomy of animals that he claimed to have found in a Chinese encyclopedia

1. 
   those that belong to the Emperor,
   
2. 
   embalmed ones,
   
3. 
   those that are trained,
   
4. 
   suckling pigs,
   
5. 
   mermaids,
   
6. 
   fabulous ones,
   
7. 
   stray dogs,
   
8. 
   those included in the present classification,
   
9. 
   those that tremble as if they were mad,
   
10. 
    innumerable ones,
    
11. 
    those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
    
12. 
    others,
    
13. 
    those that have just broken a flower vase,
    
14. 
    those that from a long way off look like flies.
    

The wonderful creativity of the taxonomy provides a good introduction for the central topic of the present chapter: How can we categorize cross-cultural studies? The classification by Borges clearly illustrates that there are various ways of classifying and that some are more useful than others. The same issue plays a role in categorizing cross-cultural studies. Many categorizations can be envisaged, but not all of them are equally consequential.
Common distinctions are between cross-national and intranational studies; the former involves different countries, while in the latter different cultural groups are studied that live in a single country. Examples of the latter are the numerous studies in which European Americans and African Americans or Hispanics are involved. In European countries intranational studies often compare majority group members and migrants or refugees or examine topics that are specific for migrants, such as acculturation processes. Examples of cross-national studies are the numerous comparisons of American and East Asian countries, such as Japan and China. Another categorization system can be based on the various psychological disciplines in which cross-cultural studies are carried out, such as social psychology, personality, and developmental psychology. An application of this perspective is particularly useful if one wants to identify areas of interest in cross- cultural psychology; social behavior is the most frequently examined behavioral domain in cross-cultural psychology. Still another perspective refers the distinction between cultural and cross-cultural psychology; the latter is culture comparative (a journal mainly devoted to comparative studies is the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, while the former is more focused on an in-depth analysis of cultural phenomena in a specific culture (journal: Culture and Psychology,). The present chapter only deals with comparative studies.
2.A Methodological Classification of Cross-Cultural Studies
The perspective to categorize studies of the current chapter is methodological. Three dimensions are introduced. The first dimension refers to the question as to whether contextual factors are included in a study. Contextual factors refer here to a wide variety of variables that could influence the cross-cultural differences observed; these variables may involve either participant characteristics (such as socioeconomic status, education, and age) or culture characteristics (such as a country's affluence and institutions). Many cross- cultural studies do not include contextual factors; these studies are interested in the comparison of countries. Examples are the large cross-national comparisons of educational achievement, such as the TIMMS project, in which the performance of secondary school students in mathematics and science is compared across many countries. One of the most essential parts of reports of such studies is a table in which the scores of the countries are ranked. In other cross-cultural studies, however, more attention is paid to cultural factors and countries are deliberately chosen because of some characteristic they have. An example is the currently popular distinction between individualistic and collectivistic countries (see the chapter on individualism and collectivism on this website).
Both types of studies have their own strengths and weaknesses. If studies include many countries, they almost always have an intrinsic interest for cross-cultural psychologists. The studies increase our insight in the cross-cultural differences and similarities across these countries. Historically, they are often the precursors of more focused studies in which country differences are seen as related to differences in underlying dimensions. The latter type study is more precise than studies in which no contextual factors were examined; therefore, they are often easier to interpret. When a cross-cultural study involves only a few countries, problems of interpretability of differences are often large. As an example, suppose that a self-esteem questionnaire has been administered to adults in the USA and Iran, and that the mean score of the Americans was higher. The seemingly obvious conclusion would be that American adults on average have a higher self-esteem than Iranian adults. The conclusion might be valid, but various alternative explanations can be envisaged. In many Islamic countries there is a norm to be humble and not to brag about one's personal qualities; as a consequence, Iranians may show lower scores. Also, unintended sample differences may account for the difference in scores; the Americans may have had more education (which is known to be positively related to self-esteem). It may well be that if one would examine samples from the two countries that have the same average educational level, the differences in scores on the questionnaire may become smaller or may even disappear altogether. Problems of interpretability are more salient in studies in which no cultural factors are included than in studies that include contextual factors. If a measure of the educational level of the participants as well as a questionnaire on the perceived norm about humility would have been administered in both countries, statistical tools, such as regression analysis or covariance analysis, could have been used to evaluate their influence on the cross-cultural score differences observed.
The second dimension to classify cross-cultural studies refers to the distinction between exploratory and hypothesis-testing studies that is commonly described in introductory textbooks to methods of research. Exploratory studies attempt to increase our understanding of cross-cultural differences by assuming a perspective that is as open and unprejudiced as possible about the nature and size of cross-cultural differences; no prior ideas are formulated about where these differences and similarities are to be expected. Researchers often want to stay "close to the data" and are not inclined to make large inferential jumps. Exploratory studies are helpful in initial stages of a research paradigm in which it is not yet clear to what extent a theory, model, or instrument "works" in another culture.
After the initial stage of exploratory studies, a researcher may feel more confident about what to expect in other cultures. In these cases hypothesis-testing studies can be carried out. In such studies theories or models about the relationship between psychological and cultural phenomena are specified at beforehand and tested for accuracy.
Both types of studies have their own strengths and weaknesses. The power to detect differences and similarities in a large variety of domains in a single study is a strength of exploratory studies. A broadband approach to cross-cultural differences provides an efficient means to collect much information in an efficient way. The openness of the exploratory approach also constitutes its weakness: exploratory studies can easily become "fishing trips" in which the researcher wants to "catch" as much as possible. In their most extreme form such studies address a multitude of cultural differences and similarities without providing any overarching framework for the patterning of the similarities of differences. In sum, exploratory studies are usually good at identifying cross- cultural differences and similarities, but poor at providing a framework to interpret these differences. The latter is the stronghold of hypothesis-testing studies, which combine theoretical precision (testing specific cultural aspects) and statistical rigor.
The third dimension to classify cross-cultural studies refers to the kind of research question addressed in a study. A distinction is made between structure-oriented and level-oriented studies. As an example of a structure-oriented study, one could ask whether the nature of intelligence differs across countries; the question is not how much samples from various countries differ in intelligence, but whether intelligence is different across countries. For example, it has been argued that Westerners tend to approach problems in an analytic way, which means that a problem is reduced to its constituent parts and solving the problem amounts to successfully dealing with all the parts in succession. Easterners, on the other hand, are said to opt more frequently for a holistic type of reasoning, in which the relations between the parts of a problem rather than the parts themselves form the essence of a problem. Whatever the validity of the latter claim, it is helpful to illustrate the issue that in many cases cross-cultural researchers are not interested in quantitative differences, but in qualitative similarities and differences. These structure-oriented studies focus on relationships among variables and attempt to identify similarities and differences in these relationships across cultures.
Level-oriented studies examine the size of cross-cultural differences. Examples are the numerous studies in which the level of individualism and collectivism are compared across countries and the studies in which the school performances of American pupils and Eastern Asian pupils are compared.
Structure- and level-oriented studies are complementary and often follow each other in time. Studies that examine the similarity of structures across countries are often done first. They pave the way for a second wave of studies in which scores are compared across countries. Although the two kinds of studies often do not have the neat temporal separation suggested here, it is important to realize that they address different questions and that a numerical comparison of scores requires that an instrument measures the same in each cultural group considered. Take the cross-cultural study of depression as an example. Depression has a somatic component (e.g., sleeplessness and loss of appetite) as well as a psychological component (e.g., feeling down and being pessimistic). There are indications that individuals from different cultures with depressive symptoms show more agreement in their somatic symptoms than in their psychological complaints. To some extent this may be a consequence of differences in norms about expressing personal feelings to others. A comparison of depression scores obtained in different cultures can show misleading results if the symptoms (or at least the tendency to report these) are not identical across cultures.
Examples
The three classification dimensions (i.e., contextual factors included or not included; exploratory vs. hypothesis-testing; structure-oriented vs. level-oriented) produce a total of 8 (= 2 x 2 x 2) studies, as can be seen in Table 1.
The eight possibilities are illustrated on the basis of a fictitious set of studies (Table 2 briefly presents real examples, which are not further discussed here). Suppose that we have a theory of emotions according to which each human emotion is a combination of two, independent components: valence (positive and negative emotions) and intensity (low and high intensity) and an instrument that has shown this structure in samples of British psychology students. Each emotion is then seen a point in a two-dimensional space. In the first type of study, structure-oriented psychological differences studies (the names and order of Table 1 are followed here), the researcher may develop a new instrument for a culture in which the instrument has not yet been administered; the development should start from a thorough knowledge of the specific culture. The newly developed instrument is then administered and the researcher examines whether the two-dimensional structure is also present in the new sample.
Table 1.
Types of Studies in Cross-Cultural Psychology (after van de Vijver & Leung, 1997).