Wagner Wolfgang, Hansen Karolina, Kronberger Nicole
Department of Social and Economic Psychology, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Altenberger Straße 69 4040, Linz, Austria,
Integr Psychol Behav Sci. 2014 Dec;48(4):418-34. doi: 10.1007/s12124-014-9269-z.
Growing globalisation of the world draws attention to cultural differences between people from different countries or from different cultures within the countries. Notwithstanding the diversity of people's worldviews, current cross-cultural research still faces the challenge of how to avoid ethnocentrism; comparing Western-driven phenomena with like variables across countries without checking their conceptual equivalence clearly is highly problematic. In the present article we argue that simple comparison of measurements (in the quantitative domain) or of semantic interpretations (in the qualitative domain) across cultures easily leads to inadequate results. Questionnaire items or text produced in interviews or via open-ended questions have culturally laden meanings and cannot be mapped onto the same semantic metric. We call the culture-specific space and relationship between variables or meanings a 'cultural metric', that is a set of notions that are inter-related and that mutually specify each other's meaning. We illustrate the problems and their possible solutions with examples from quantitative and qualitative research. The suggested methods allow to respect the semantic space of notions in cultures and language groups and the resulting similarities or differences between cultures can be better understood and interpreted.
世界全球化程度的不断提高，使人们开始关注来自不同国家或同一国家内不同文化背景的人们之间的文化差异。尽管人们的世界观多种多样，但当前的跨文化研究仍面临着如何避免民族中心主义的挑战；在未明确检验概念对等性的情况下，将西方主导的现象与不同国家的类似变量进行比较，存在很大问题。在本文中，我们认为跨文化间简单地比较测量结果（在定量领域）或语义解释（在定性领域）很容易导致结果不充分。问卷调查项目或访谈中产生的文本，或是通过开放式问题得到的文本，都具有文化负载意义，不能映射到相同的语义度量上。我们将特定文化中变量或意义之间的空间和关系称为“文化度量”，即一组相互关联、相互明确彼此意义的概念。我们通过定量和定性研究的例子来说明这些问题及其可能的解决方案。所建议的方法能够尊重不同文化和语言群体中概念的语义空间，从而更好地理解和解释不同文化之间由此产生的异同。
