ABSTRACT

The measurement of cultural consonance has been developed most fully in a series of research projects carried out in urban Brazil. This chapter describes this research in detail. The measurement model employs cultural domain analysis from the cognitive sciences to explore how people culturally construct a cultural domain within a specific society. Then, using the output of cultural consensus analysis, individual-level measures that match people to that cultural construction are derived. These measures have high “emic validity” in that they order individuals along a continuum in terms they themselves use to talk about that domain.