Reciprocal Bicultural Rating for Cross- and Subcultural Comparisons

Abstract

Cross-cultural studies are of general interest to the behavioral scientist because of the opportunity to study the effects of various childrearing practices on personality. With our nation's worldwide involvement and a strong desire to understand and be accepted by other nations, cross-cultural studies have gained additional importance. Fortunately, the increasing geographical mobiliry of our citizens increases the feasibility of such studies. In the USA many participant observers were reared in foreign countries and later immigrated to the USA; many others were reared in the USA and have lived or are living in a foreign country, e.g., high school and college students participate in cultural exchange programs, businessmen conduct their affairs in foreign countries, armed service personnel are srationed abroad, and Peace Corps enrollees live up to 2 yr. in close working relationships with foreign people. Individuals who have been reared in one culture and lived in another are asked to compare the two culcures on a variety of topics. For instance, raters now living either in Germany or in the USA who have lived in both cultures may be asked to indicate in which of the two cultures a certain trait or practice is more prevalent. Thus, bicultural judgments on almost any topic relevant to one or both culmres may be obtained. If a third to a half of the bicultural raters were reared in one culture and the remaining raters were reared in the other culture, one obtains two sets of ratings, one being the reciprocal of the other. With these ratings, one may assess intergroup reliability by comparing the extent of agreement. The topics on which agreement is found can be assumed to be relatively free of cultural bias on the pact of the raters. The reciprocal bicultural method obviates translating rating instruments into another language and circumvents the need for standardizing these instruments in the other culture prior to collecting data. Using a survey questionnaire written entirely in English, Karr and Wesley (1965, 1966) found in a comparison of German and US childrearing practices a strong majority agreement by both sets of raters that US parents are more controlling in several key areas than German parents. Within our nation surveys are exploring the needs of our marginal, disconnected, disadvantaged population segments. Methodological problems similar to those found in cross-cultural surveys are observed because the middle-class white researcher often suffers from the same blind spots when devising a survey instrument to investigate minority groups within our culture as the cross-cultural researcher who has never lived in another culture. To use the reciprocal bicultural rater model to study a disadvantaged segment within one's culture, ratings are obtained from those who have moved out of the disadvantaged class into the more privileged mainstream and from those who have moved from the mainstream into the disadvantaged class. Help in formulating the survey instrument may be profitably