Papers from the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology Conferences
Publication Date
2016
Abstract
For many years I have advocated the view that cross-cultural psychology should have the following characteristics: it begins with an ethnographic search to select those settings that may provide the cultural and ecological contexts that are theoretically-relevant to the development of the particular behaviour of interest; this is followed by advancing hypotheses that link the context to the behaviour; then fieldwork is undertaken to further examine these cultural attributes, and to carry out the assessment of the behaviour of individuals. These activities are carried out across contexts for three reasons: (i) in order to gain sufficient variation in the cultural and behavioural information to allow the examination of their co-variation (ie. to assess the hypothesis); (ii) to search for universals in the structure of behaviours; and (iii) to allow the possible discovery of universals in culture- behaviour relationships. In my view, cross-cultural psychology is cultural first, then psychological, and then comparative.
ScholarWorks Citation
Berry, J. W. (2016). Culture + behaviour + comparison = cross-cultural psychology. In C. Roland-Lévy, P. Denoux, B. Voyer, P. Boski, & W. K. Gabrenya Jr. (Eds.), Unity, diversity and culture. Proceedings from the 22nd Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. https://doi.org/10.4087/HVIH1135
