ABSTRACT
A fundamental concern of cross-cultural psychology is to attend equally to both human behavior and the context in which it develops and takes place. It is argued that unless we understand important features of the population (including its culture and biology, its history and current economic situation) we cannot be in a position to interpret the behaviors that we observe and measure. Research studies and reports that limit their attention to population characteristics by merely naming them (e.g., “blacks”) or classifying them (e.g. “lower class”) simply do not provide any basis for making inferences about the possible roots of their measurements. Lacking such contextual information, there is often an implicit invitation to draw upon stereotypical (and frequently ethnocentric) “knowledge” about what features of the population may be inferred to account for the observed behavior. One aim of this chapter is to provide an example of how to approach the study of population characteristics and contexts that are theoretically relevant to the behavior domain of interest. In a sense, it deliberately errs on the side of emphasizing context, as a partial antidote to the more usual problem of making a full-scale psychometric assessment and paying limited (even no) attention to the population.
