Although ethnography has traditionally been regarded as high in validity, assessment of reliability in anthropological field research is very difficult. Fortunately, forms of systematic data collection exist that !end themselves both to reliability testing and replication. The analysis of culture in terms of high-concordance codes that compose systemic culture patterns is way to generate reliable data and replicable studies. (High-concordance codes, systemic culture patterns, cultural consensus analysis, culture theory, reliability) The viability of cross-cultural and intracultural comparative research rests on degree to which units of analysis are actually comparable. In turn, comparability of units of analysis substantially depends on degree to which measurements of them are reliable and valid. While ethnography is generally regarded as high in validity, assessment of reliability in anthropological field research has typically been difficult. Moreover, in recent years worth of reliability itself has been questioned. For interpretive or postmodern anthropologists who subscribe to notion that ethnography is a genre of storytelling (Bruner 1986:139) where task of anthropologist is to critique ethnographic stories (Lett 1997:10), techniques of literary criticism are more appropriate than those of science. But if attention of interpretive anthropologists is directed at the way social reality is to be presented (Marcus and Fischer 1986:165) rather than at social reality itself, one can reasonably question value of entire enterprise (Lett 1997). Even dean of interpretive anthropology, Clifford Geertz, has recognized that problems exist with approach. In The Interpretation of Cultures, he (Geertz 1973) indicated that the besetting sin of interpretive approaches ... is that they tend to resist, or to be permitted to resist, conceptual articulation and thus to escape systematic modes of assessment. Further, he claimed that there is no reason why conceptual structure of cultural interpretation should be any less.., susceptible to of appraisal (Geertz 1973:24, quoted in Lett 1997:8). Reliability of measurement is one of explicit canons of scientific appraisal, and essence of reliability is consistency. The methods used to obtain information should provide same results when administered under same conditions. The problem is that assessment of reliability in ethnography is far from simple. Participant-observation and interview studies simply do not lend themselves easily to reliability testing in way that surveys do. The internal consistency of surveys can be assessed and they can be administered to same informants second time. They can be administered to other informants at other times and in other places. It is difficult or impossible to do any of these with participant-observation studies. In addition, ethnographic targets move; cultures change and thereby render efforts to test reliability moot. However, systematic ethnographic techniques exist that permit reliability testing, replication, and assessment of culture change (see, e.g., Weller and Romney 1988). Moreover, some ways of conceptualizing culture, and cultural units of analysis, are more amenable to use of such systematic techniques than others. Analysis of culture in terms of high-concordance codes that compose systemic culture patterns lends itself both to reliability testing and replication. If, as Romney and Moore (1999) claim, systemic culture patterns are fundamental units for evolution and transmission of culture, then they may also be ideal units of analysis for comparative research. SYSTEMIC CULTURE PATTERNS In his classic text, Anthropology, Alfred L. Kroeber (1948:311) described four kinds of culture patterns. These include the universal, systemic, societal or whole-culture, and style type of patterns. …