12 - Cross-Cultural Meta-Analysis

Summary

Introduction

The impact of culture on psychological functioning has received increasing attention over the past decades. Scrutiny of the PsycInfo database (May 2006) shows that the percentage of studies addressing culture, ethnicity, or race has been steadily increasing from 4.6% of all published psychological studies between 1960 and 1970 to 9.3% between 1990 and 2000. There is a clear need for accumulating and systematizing knowledge from this vast amount of cross-cultural studies and for developing models that deal with cross-cultural differences in psychology. Approaches to explaining cross-cultural differences and similarities seem to be dependent on research domain; for example, studies involving cross-cultural cognitive research generally regard cultural differences as evidence for a cultural bias in their measurement (Faucheux, 1976).

Cross-cultural psychology would benefit from a valid representation of magnitude and sources of cross-cultural variation across all research domains. Meta-analysis can provide such representation by summarizing a great range of results from many single-culture and cross-cultural studies and estimating the actual size of cross-cultural differences using effect sizes that are corrected for artifacts. A meta-analysis reanalyzes results from studies that report on a specific relationship to reach an overall conclusion on this research question, thereby accumulating research and fostering theory building (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). In addition, meta-analysis can address questions not originally considered in the primary studies by taking into account characteristics of studies that can explain variance in the effect size. Meta-analytic techniques help reviewers avoid problems common to traditional reviews such as subjectivity of study selection, inability to quantify the effect size, and difficulties in accounting for methodological differences between studies. Further, meta-analysis can examine models of explanatory factors in cross-cultural differences using moderator variables. This asset of meta-analysis is particularly useful in view of the peculiarities of different research domains in psychology with respect to the preferred type of explanation for cross-cultural differences and similarities. Therefore, meta-analysis is a powerful tool for advancing cross-cultural theorizing and an exceptionally valuable contribution to cross-cultural research methods.