Chapter #4: Research Methods Flashcards
What are principles to keep in mind when conducting cross-cultural research?
- Selecting cultures to study = look for cultures that vary on specific theoretical dimensions
- Explore the degree of unviersality of certain psychological processes
- Making meaningful comparisons = find collaborators native to the region
What is Methodological Equivalence?
a variety of statistical techniques are applied to cross cultural studies of survey data to ensure it
* achieving this is challenging when cultures are not comparably familiar with the research setting
* must adapt their procedures so they are understandalbe in all the cultures that are being studied
Why are college student studies still not the best example for cross cultural studies?
- generalizability = cannot confidently generalize their results if there is not much evidence
- power = its capacity to detect an effort to the extent that such an effect really exists
*
What are some of the concerns when using questionaires or surveys for cross-cultural research?
1) To keep test in original language nad only study billingual people
2) Pariticpnts with good english skills are not representative of their culture
3) giving billingual respondents materials in English and comparing them to those of native english speakers
What is Back-Translation?
a stategy to avoid translation problems
1) translate original to second language
2) translate second language back to the original
* may result in unnatural or hard to understand translation
What is Response Bias?
a factor that distorts the accuracy of a person’s response to survey questiosn
What is Socially Desirable Responding?
people who strongly show this bias are motivated to be evaluated positive by others; as a result they might disguise their true feelings to seem more acceptable
What is Moderacy & Extremity Bias?
tendnecy for people to express their agreement in certain fashion
* Moderate = choosing midpoint in scale
* Extreme = choosing at either end
What are ways to fix Moderacy & Extremity Bias?
- avoid giving a middle option
- standardization preserves participant pattern of responses; statistically forcing to have a uniform response style
What is an Acquiescence Bias?
a tendency to agree with most statements
* a total approval score is calculated by summing the responses
* makes it hard to compare individual true degree of potential
What is a way to fix Acquiescence Bias?
Reverse Score - questions written so that by agreeing with them they indiciate the opposite opinion
What is the Reference Group Effect?
people from different cultures tend to evaluate themselves by comparing to different reference groups
* usually we are intersted in assessing culture by a single standard
What are ways to avoid Reference Group Effect?
- avoid subjective measures that might have different standards in the group being compured; use concrete items
- use quantitative words like percentages or numbers occurences
- forced to choose from two or more options
What is the Deprivation Effect?
in cultures where there is chronically less personal safety, people would express valuing it more
* only way is to see whether self-report results coverage with the rest of the results from other sources
What is Between Groups Manipulation?
different groups of participants receive different levels of the I.V. (conditions)
What is Within Groups Manipulations?
each participants receives more than one level of the I.V.
What are reasons why replication may not be possible in a study?
1) original findings was not reliable - could have emerged by chance, by a mistkae in procedure, or analyses
2) The replication effort itself had problems - finding could emerge by chance, original was not followed
3) Finding in one culture may not occur because a phenomenon is shaped by cultural factors
What is Situtation Sampling?
approach that uses the fact that cultures do not affect people in the abstract; they affect people in particular concrete ways
* gives us specific situations we encounter routinely
* we adopt habitual ways on thinking about ourselves
* allows 2 types of anaylsis
What is Cultural Priming?
works by making certain ideas more accessible to participants
* if those ideas are aossicated with cultural meanings
* researchers can investigate what happens when people start to think about them
What is Tightness-Looseness?
the degree to which a culture, or society, has strong social norms and low tolerance for people who violate those norms
* creative solutions submitted by tight culture = less effective at addressing the foreign problems
* tight cultures provide more effective solutions for their own cultures more than loose
What is Unpacking?
finding means identifiying the underlying variables that gave rise to cultural differences
What is A Culture of Honor?
people (especially men) strive to protect their reputation through aggression
