Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 209

An additional problem that can arise when conducting cross-cultural research is determining how to sample across cultures or persons within cultures (Berry et al., 2002; Matsumoto & Juang, 2004). How does the researcher decide which cultures to choose? Sometimes this can be a matter of convenience, such as when the researchers have direct contacts in more than one culture. Other times psychologists select cultures that are likely to be or have been previously shown to be different on a key variable, such as individualism/collectivism. Both researchers and students must remember the fact that there is great variation between nations despite the fact that these nations may be similar in their overall levels of individualism/collectivism. Once the cultures have been chosen, researchers then must determine which samples in the cultures to include in the research. Given the enormous variability within cultures, care must be taken when selecting samples to ensure that they are as equivalent as possible (J. G. Miller, 2004). White participants from, say, working class Manchester, UK, may be very different from White participants living in a wealthy suburb of London. Moreover, a mostly White sample drawn from an elite U.S. educational institution may be different in terms of socioeconomic variables from a sample drawn from an elite university in, say, Kenya. As a result, researchers should be cautious in their interpretation of results from cross-cultural studies. Potential confounds related to differences in samples that cannot be avoided need to be considered, and generalizations to other cultures should be made judiciously (Cohen, 2007).