Significant Cross-cultural Differences Research Articles

CLIMATE CHANGE AWARENESS DIFFERENCES AMONG PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN KOREA AND INDONESIA

The pressing issue of climate change demands an informed future generation, yet how aware are students? This study dives into the varying levels of climate change awareness among 1,079 Korean and 2,507 Indonesian primary school students using a sophisticated survey tool developed by Lee et al. (2021). Surprisingly, while both groups exhibited high levels of awareness, significant cross-cultural differences were uncovered. Indonesian students demonstrated higher levels of action, concern, belief, attention, and policy. This stands in stark contrast to Korean students, who, despite having a higher understanding of causes and effects, showed lower levels of belief and attention to the issue. These findings not only challenge us to rethink our educational strategies but also underscore the critical role of cultural contexts in shaping environmental awareness. This comparative analysis reveals startling insights into the complexities of educating the next generation about climate change, setting the stage for urgent educational reforms. Keywords: climate change education, awareness of climate change, cross-cultural comparison, South Korea, Indonesia, primary school students

The Impact of Emojis on Verbal Irony Comprehension in Computer-Mediated Communication: A Cross-Cultural Study

This study examines the influence of emojis on the comprehension of verbal irony in computer-mediated communication (CMC), with a focus on cross-cultural comparisons between Chinese and American participants. Verbal irony, often reliant on paralinguistic cues absent in text-based communication, poses comprehension challenges in CMC. Emojis, as nonverbal cues, are hypothesized to aid in conveying and interpreting ironic intent. The research involved 96 participants, equally divided between the two cultures, who were presented with scenarios containing verbal irony accompanied by either a winking or smiling emoji, or no emoji. The findings suggest significant cross-cultural differences in irony comprehension facilitated by emojis. American participants showed improved irony comprehension with the winking emoji, aligning with its conventional association with sarcasm in Western cultures. Conversely, Chinese participants better understood irony when paired with the smiling emoji, highlighting cultural variations in emoji interpretation. The study underscores the complex role of cultural context in digital communication.

MIsgivings about measurement invariance

This paper critically evaluates the conventional insistence on establishing measurement invariance (MI) in cross-cultural psychology. We argue that complex and seemingly arbitrary benchmarks for assessing MI can be unrealistic and effectively prohibit meaningful research. The widespread use of various MI criteria creates unnecessary and often unattainable hurdles for cross-cultural researchers who have made the effort to collect data in multiple cultural contexts. Additionally, the prohibitionist tone of discussions surrounding MI is unhelpful, unscientific, and discouraging. We argue that emerging findings that cultural differences might not be as widespread or profound as once assumed imply that significant cross-cultural differences in measurement should not be the default assumption. Additionally, we advocate a shift towards external validity as a more useful metric of measurement quality. Our overall message is that researchers who go to the considerable trouble of gathering data in more than one country should not be disadvantaged compared to researchers who avoid cross-cultural complications by gathering data only at their home campus.

Digital immigrants’ attitudes toward e-reading in Iraq and Pakistan

PurposeIn the digital transformation race, the older generation, called digital immigrants (generation X), encounter various obstacles. This study aims to investigate the e-reading adoption and cross-cultural differences among generation X.Design/methodology/approachThis study collected survey-based data from generation X e-readers in Iraq and Pakistan (Pakistan, N = 235; Iraq, N = 251). Structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis (MGA) were used to arrive at a statistical decision regarding the hypotheses and the study’s primary objectives.FindingsThree hypotheses (H2, H3 and H8) were supported by both data sets. However, there is positive variance based on MGA for two hypotheses (H1 and H3) where the Pakistani sample’s path coefficients are greater than the Iraqi sample’s path coefficients. In contrast, there is negative variance based on MGA for two hypotheses (H7 and H9) where the Iraqi sample’s path coefficients are greater than the Pakistani sample’s path coefficients. Finally, these distinctions are examined, along with a few potential research topicsOriginality/valueAlthough there is a plethora of literature on digital immigrants and technology adoption in general, and specifically on e-reading uptake. Research on e-reading adoption in a global learning context is still lacking. Therefore, this study examines the e-reading behavior of digital immigrants from two developing countries (Iraq and Pakistan) and identifies significant cross-cultural differences in e-reading adoption.

Cross-cultural differences in children’s evaluations of antisocial and prosocial lies: A meta-analytic review

ABSTRACT The present review aimed to examine cross-cultural differences (eastern vs western cultures) in the evaluation of antisocial and prosocial lies through two meta-analyses. A total of 10 studies consisting of 2,347 participants between 5 and 12 years of age were included. Both meta-analyses did not find significant cross-cultural differences on either antisocial lies (Hedges g = −0.07, p > 0.05) or prosocial lies (Hedges’ g = 0.24, p > 0.05). Further, age did not have any significant moderator effect on either of the analyses. Since the inter-cultural differences were not significant, the present meta-analytic review opens new research avenues to explore more intra-cultural differences on various socialization practices within a culture that may influence the lying behaviour of children.

The effect of mobile phone addiction on perceived stress and mediating role of ruminations: Evidence from Chinese and Czech university students.

The rise in the capabilities of mobile devices and the associated increase in the proportion of time we spend on them has not only positive benefits but also several risks, including mobile phone addiction and its consequences. The complex mechanisms of the impact of this addiction on mental health, especially in a cross-cultural context, however, remain relatively unknown. The aim of this cross-cultural study was to investigate the mediating role of rumination on the association between mobile phone addiction and perceived stress. A population of 358 Chinese and 282 Czech university students was tested using a battery of validated psychological tests that included a short version of the Smartphone Addiction Scale, the Ruminative Response Scale, and the Perceived Stress Scale. The results showed significant cross-cultural differences with Czech students manifesting greater rumination (d = 0.79) and perceived stress (d = 0.42) and Chinese students showing greater mobile phone addiction (d = 1.01). Mediation analyses showed that the effect of mobile phone addiction on stress levels was mediated through the rumination in both populations (45.6% and 80.9% of the explained variance for Chinese and Czech students, respectively) and did not differ between the two countries (estimate of difference [95%CI] = -0.052[-0.166, 0.037], p = 0.27). In contrast, the significant direct effect of mobile phone addiction on perceived stress was only present in Chinese students, where it was marginally larger than the indirect effect. In Czech students, the direct effect was not manifested and the difference between countries was significant (estimate of difference [95%CI] = 0.242 [0.035, 0.413], p < 0.001). In all of the cases, the association between the variables was positive, i.e., as one grew, so did the other. Finally, a moderated-mediation analysis confirmed that country of origin significantly moderated only the direct relationship between mobile phone dependence and perceived stress (p = 0.002). These results suggest that the mechanism of interaction between excessive mobile phone use and perceived stress is culturally conditioned, which may limit the transferability of research findings in a global context and requires further cross-cultural studies.

Toward Sustainable Couchsurfing: A Comparative Study on Hosting Motives and Behaviors between the USA and China

Couchsurfing has become a global phenomenon, and its sustainable development highly depends on hosts and their behavioral choice. However, there was seldom discussion on hosts’ motives and behaviors. This study aimed to identify the dimensions of motives and behaviors among CS hosts and explored the cultural differences between the US and Chinese hosts from the perspective of altruism. A total of 462 questionnaires (246 Americans and 216 Chinese) were collected from multiple sources. The findings reveal that CS hosts have definite altruistic motivations, namely relaxation and pleasure, socialization, knowledge enhancement, and escape, which are reflected in behaviors through hospitality, close interaction, daily life involvement, and trust establishment. CS should be a win-win situation both to the hosts and surfers in a nonmonetary way. Hosts are heterogeneous groups with significant cross-cultural differences between the US and Chinese samples.

What is to be sustained? The polysemy of sustainability and sustainable tourism across languages and cultures

“Sustainability” and “sustainable tourism” are widely debated concepts in tourism worldwide. However, the specific meaning of both concepts across different cultures has not been fully researched, and the terms are frequently assumed to have identical meanings to audiences from different cultures. We aim to close this research gap by studying how tourists from four different countries define and conceptualise “sustainability” and “sustainable tourism.” Specifically, we asked participants from Germany, Italy, Norway, and the United States to define “sustainability” and “sustainable tourism” using open ended questions in a qualitative study. We study the responses using an interdisciplinary framework which is based on research from tourism, intercultural studies, linguistics, and cognitive psychology. The findings show significant cross-cultural differences in respondents’ interpretations of sustainability and sustainable tourism, regarding both the content and the linguistic form of the definitions. Our research challenges the silent assumption that consumers worldwide share a common understanding of sustainability in tourism. We conclude that strategies for promoting sustainability and sustainable tourism must use strong verbal and visual cues tailored to the culture and language of diverse target groups. This includes the use of meaningful culture-specific symbols representing sustainability. Additionally, tourism researchers should be aware that an injudicious transfer of polysemous terms such as “sustainability” and “sustainable tourism” across different contexts and study designs may bias research results.

Online Behaviours during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Their Associations with Psychological Factors: An International Exploratory Study.

This cross-sectional study aimed to explore specific online behaviours and their association with a range of underlying psychological and other behavioural factors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight countries (Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Portugal, Japan, Hungary, and Brazil) participated in an international investigation involving 2223 participants (M = 33 years old; SD = 11), 70% of whom were females. Participants were surveyed for specific type of Internet use severity, appearance anxiety, self-compassion, and image and use of performance-enhancing drugs (IPEDs). Results were compared cross-culturally. The mean time spent online was 5 h (SD = ±3) of daily browsing during the pandemic. The most commonly performed activities included social networking, streaming, and general surfing. A strong association between these online behaviours and appearance anxiety, self-compassion, and IPEDs use was found after adjustment for possible confounders, with higher scores being associated with specific online activities. Significant cross-cultural differences also emerged in terms of the amount of time spent online during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interactional preludes to infants’ affective climax – Mother-infant interaction around infant smiling in two cultures

Due to limited research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in the development of infant smiling, the main goals of this study were to analyze, first, the development of infants’ bouts of intense smiling during their third month and, second, the interactional preludes to infants’ affective climax in two cultural contexts, namely Kichwa families from the Ecuadorian Andes region and educated urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany, which differ concerning their cultural models on infant smiling. Based on a longitudinal, naturalistic study design, mother-infant interaction in Kichwa (n = 10) and Münster (n = 10) families was analyzed when infants were 9 and 13 weeks old. Following a mixed methods approach, a quantitative analysis of infant smiling based on a 1-second interval-coding approach showed that there was a significant increase in infants’ high-intensity positive affect from 9 to 13 weeks in the Münster, but not the Kichwa sample, leading to significant cross-cultural differences at 13 weeks. Complementarily, the qualitative analysis of the interactional preludes to the 66 infants’ affective climaxes at 13 weeks identified two main patterns that characterized the dynamic that resulted in high-intensity positive affect and that were similar across the two cultural contexts: the first was intense and multimodal stimulation with repetition and theme variation, and the second was positively tuned and mutually contingent responsiveness, often in the form of prolonged proto-conversations between mother and infant. Overall, this open approach converged on key mechanisms underlying infant smiling, namely infants’ experience of mastery based on effortful assimilation or self-efficacy, which was embedded in episodes of intersubjective coordination. Overall, these results suggest universality without uniformity; that is, similar interactional mechanisms are associated with high-intense positivity in infants, while the episodes are co-constructed differently in different dyads and high-intense positivity varies in significance and frequency across cultures.

Different types of focus: Caregiver-child interaction and changes in preschool children's attention in two cultures.

Social contexts shape the development of attention; however, little is known about joint attention beyond infancy. This study employed behavioral and eye-tracking measurements to investigate cultural variations in how caregivers direct 3- to 4-year-old children's attention and subsequent changes in children's attention to objects and contextual backgrounds in the United States (predominantly non-Hispanic Whites) and Japan (N=60mother-child dyads, 29girls, 31 boys). The findings revealed that caregivers directed children's attention to culturally sensitive information, and significant cross-cultural differences in attention emerged after caregiver-child interaction, with Japanese children shifting their attention to the backgrounds. Results provide new insights into the role of social interaction and cultural diversity in the development of attention.

Cross-Cultural Differences in Temperament Between the United States and the People’s Republic of China: A Longitudinal Comparison

Aims: The present study assessed cross-cultural differences in temperament and temperament stability between children from the United States (US) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Goals of the study include examining differences in three temperament factors (surgency, negative affectivity, and regulation/effortful control), conducting comparisons on fine-grained dimensions of factors demonstrating significant cross-cultural differences, and comparing temperament stability from infancy to toddlerhood.&#x0D; Methodology: The US sample (N = 147) and PRC sample (N = 128) consisted of children whose temperament was longitudinally assessed in infancy and toddlerhood using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised Short Form (IBQ-R SF) and the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire Short Form (ECBQ SF). Primary analyses involved evaluating mean differences in the three temperament factors: surgency, negative affectivity, and regulation/effortful control, with additional statistical tests conducted to investigate fine-grained distinctions.&#x0D; Results: Findings revealed main effects of culture for each factor with culture x time interactions indicating negative affectivity significantly differed in toddlerhood, t(273) = -8.27, P &lt; .001, d = 1.00, 98.75% CI [-0.70, -0.37], and regulation in infancy, t(273) = -5.17, P &lt; .001, d = 0.62, 98.75% CI [-0.62, -0.22]. Specifically, the US sample exhibited higher surgency at both time points, lower negative affectivity in toddlerhood, and lower regulation in infancy. In addition, little difference was noted in temperament stability between the US and Chinese samples.&#x0D; Conclusion: Our findings support previous reports identifying cultural differences in temperament and highlight that differences are not constant across early childhood, but rather that as development unfolds, their nature is subject to change.

The Allocation of a Scarce Medical Resource: A Cross-Cultural Study Investigating the Influence of Life Style Factors and Patient Gender, and the Coherence of Decision-making

ABSTRACT This study examined how lifestyle factors and gender affect kidney allocation to transplant patients by 99 British and Singaporean participants. Thirty hypothetical patients were generated from a combination of six factors (alcohol intake, smoking frequency, weight, exercise frequency, diet, and gender) and randomly paired four times. Participants saw 60 patient pairings and, in each pair, chose which patient would receive treatment priority. A Bradley-Terry model was used to derive coefficients for each factor per participant. A mean factor score (MFS) was then calculated across all participants for each factor. Participants gave lower priority to patients who drank more, were overweight, smoked more and exercised less. A patient’s diet and gender had no significant effect on allocation. There were no significant cross-cultural differences. There were moderate correlations between participants’ self-reported pre- and post-experiment ordering of decision criteria, and these measures and factor coefficients, suggesting a modest level of decision-making consistency. Between participants, moderate levels of concordance with respect to factor importance were observed for self-reported orderings of factors, and weaker agreement for model-derived coefficients. Very similar results were obtained for both British and Singaporean participants, and the implications of the findings are discussed.

Motivation Toward Choosing Psychology as a Secondary School Subject: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Background:During the past two decades, psychology has become a favorite school subject in many countries. This situation has led to studies on students’ attitudes and perceptions of psychology as a secondary school subject.Objective:The purpose of this study was to compare motives for choosing psychology as a school subject among secondary school students (15–19 years of age) from England and Slovakia.Method:In this study, we administered an online questionnaire to gather data about motivation toward studying psychology among secondary students in England ( n = 150) and Slovakia ( n = 210).Results:For both groups, the most frequent motives and beliefs influencing the choice of psychology were self-understanding and understanding behaviors of others. However, significant cross-cultural differences in other motives emerged (e.g., the perception of difficulty of psychology as a school subject).Conclusion:Students, regardless the cultural context, choose psychology mostly to understand how the human mind works and to understand human behavior to help people.Teaching Implications:Pre-tertiary psychology teachers therefore need to accept a challenge to fulfill students’ expectations and to raise awareness of pre-tertiary students’ perceptions and beliefs about psychology among decision makers on national and international levels.

The multiple group IRT measurement invariance analysis of the Self-Compassion Scale in ten international samples

The purpose of this study was to examine the measurement invariance of the Self-Compassion Scale by IRT differential test functioning in ten distinct populations (n = 13623 participants) from ten different countries: Australia (n = 517), China (n = 321), Czech Republic (n = 5081), Germany (n = 2510), Italy (n = 384), Portugal (n = 512), Slovakia (n = 1181), South Korea (n = 1813), Turkey (n = 471), and USA (n = 833). We assessed differential test functioning for the two SCS subscales, Self-compassionate responding and Self-uncompassionate responding separately, because previous bifactor and two-tier analyses of the scale showed the best fit with two separate general factors, and not for the overall score. Only 13 of the 45 comparisons for Self-compassionate responding and 13 of the 45 comparisons for Self-uncompassionate responding (analyses of every pair) demonstrated measurement invariance (no differential test functioning). Generally, our results revealed that the two subscales of Self-compassionate responding and Self-uncompassionate responding were not equivalent among all countries and groups. Therefore, it is impossible to compare overall scores across all countries. Two subscales of the Self-Compassion Scale (Self-compassionate responding and Self-uncompassionate responding) are valid and reliable instruments with substantial potential of use cross-culturally, but results reveal significant cross-cultural differences in the way these two constructs are measured by the subscales of the SCS. Future analyses of the meanings and connotations of this construct across the world are necessary to develop a scale which allows cross-cultural comparisons of various treatment outcomes related to self-compassion.

ETHNOCULTURAL PREFERENCES OF LOGIC AND INTUITIVE THINKING

The paper analyzes the results of an experimental study of the preferences of logical and intuitive thinking of Udmurt and Russian students (a total of 121 people). In logical thinking, an object is selected from its context and assigned to categories based on necessary and sufficient functions, with the preferred use of rules, including rules of formal logic. Intuitive thinking based on life experience is characterized by integrity and contextuality with a dialectical resolution of obvious contradictions. The research program, developed on the basis of a conceptual categorization model, consisted of a training phase and an experiment phase. In the computer program, categorization “by rule” was performed by determining how much a new object satisfies a rule that defines categories by their necessary and sufficient characteristics; categorization “by pattern” - by similarity of the new object with existing samples. The experiment created a cognitive conflict between thought strategies. The experiment results show that Russian students prefer to classify objects “by rule” in case of positive and negative matches of characteristics, while Udmurt students prefer “by pattern” There were no significant cross-cultural differences between negative match indicators, when the images “according to the rule” were very similar to the training sample from the opposite category. The explanation of the obtained data was carried out in comparison with the “world pictures”, with their cognitive content about the ways of cognition of the surrounding world, embodied in the traditional values of peoples.

Democracy in context: using a\xa0distributional semantic model to study differences in the usage of democracy across languages and countries

Cross-cultural survey research rests upon the assumption that if survey features are kept constant, data will remain comparable across languages, cultures and countries. Yet translating concepts across languages, cultures and political contexts is complicated by linguistic, cultural, normative or institutional discrepancies. Such discrepancies are particularly relevant for complex political concepts such as democracy, where the literature on political support has revealed significant cross-cultural differences in people’s attitudes toward democracy. Recognizing that language, culture and other socio-political variables affect survey results has often been equated with giving up on comparative research and many survey researchers have consequently chosen to simply ignore the issue of comparability and measurement equivalence across languages, cultures and countries. This paper contributes to the debate, using a distributional semantic lexicon, which is a statistical model measuring co-occurrence statistics in large text data. The method is motivated by structuralist meaning theory, stating that words with similar meanings tend to occur in similar contexts, and that contexts shape and define the meanings of words. Compared to other methodological approaches aimed at identifying and measuring cross-cultural discrepancies, this approach enables us to systematically analyze how the concept of democracy is used in its natural habitat. Collecting geo-tagged language data from news and social online source documents this paper descriptively explores varieties in meanings of democracy across a substantial number of languages and countries, and maps ways in which democracy is used among online populations and regions worldwide.

Early Learning Environments for the Development of Attention: Maternal Narratives in the United States and Japan.

A large body of research has demonstrated cross-cultural differences in visual attention, especially between members of North American societies (e.g., Canada, United States) and East Asian societies (e.g., China, Japan, Korea). Despite an increasing number of studies suggesting an emergence of cross-cultural differences in early childhood, relatively little is known about how these culturally divergent patterns of attention are acquired and maintained. It has been largely assumed that socialization practices, especially parent-child interactions, contribute to the acquisition of cross-cultural differences in attention. By focusing on maternal narratives during the shared reading activity, this study examined the socialization contexts in which mothers direct their infants' attention in the United States (n = 50 dyads) and Japan (n = 53 dyads). Mothers in the United States and Japan read a picture book to their 6- to 18-month-old infants in the lab, and maternal narratives were coded to identify attention to focal objects and social interactions. Infants' sustained attention was also measured during shared reading. The findings demonstrated that during the shared reading activity, U.S. mothers were relatively more likely to focus on the focal objects than the background, whereas Japanese mothers were more likely to refer to the social interactions between focal objects and the background. Infants' age and gender were not related to maternal narratives, and infants' sustained attention was similar across cultures. Findings suggest significant cross-cultural differences in mother-infant interactions, which may act as scaffolds for infants to internalize their parents' cognitive styles.

Assessment of the Quality of Life, Health, and Social Wellness in Upper Elementary School Students: Cross-Cultural and Gender Specificity

The objective of this study is a comparative analysis of the possibilities of physical education (PE) inclusion in children with health problems, and the current status in upper elementary school boys and girls. Understanding the concept of impaired health is a precondition for the realization of the training process and possible integration in the process of PE, according to the structure of health disadvantages. Method. Quality of life was assessed with the Questionnaire (Q), and analysis was done at three levels, with adequate methods of evaluation. Results. Comparative analysis, regarding the cultural and gender specificities is elaborated, based on MANOVA and DISCRA analysis, within the Introductory part, and 11 scales of the Q. Conclusion. Analysis of data points out on the significant cross-cultural differences, considering survey results, with a special overview of total samples of respondents (boys/girls) from diverse cultural, and social backgrounds.

Investigation of the Impact of School Climate and Teachers' Self-Efficacy on Job Satisfaction: A Cross-Cultural Approach.

The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) To confirm the mediating role of teachers’ self-efficacy between the relation of school climate and teachers’ job satisfaction and (b) to tease apart any cross-cultural effects of the association of self-efficacy and job satisfaction by comparing teachers’ responses. Drawing upon the publicly available TALIS 2018 (June 2019) database, a representative sample of 51,782 primary school teachers from 15 countries was used for the analyses. Structural equation modeling was implemented to test for mediation effects of teachers’ self-efficacy at the individuals’ level and a general linear model (GLM) MANOVA was applied to compare the participants’ scores in self-efficacy and job satisfaction across cultures. Results indicate, in accordance with previous research, that self-efficacy is a mediating variable of the relation between school climate and job satisfaction at the individuals’ level across cultures. Moreover, the GLM revealed statistically significant cross-cultural differences among teachers’ responses in job satisfaction and self-efficacy. These findings have implications for teachers’ wellbeing and resilience.