ABSTRACT
The chapters in this book demonstrate that many fields in the social and behavioral sciences are inherently multilevel. Studies in cross-cultural psychology almost by definition have a multilevel nature, as context–behavior relationships often involve variables at different levels of aggregation. This book illustrates how we have conceptually and statistically advanced in the field of multilevel cross-cultural research in the last decades. Cross-level relations and questions concerning similarity of concept meaning at different levels of aggregation can now be addressed in a more rigorous manner than ever before. Examples are the meaning of response styles (Smith & Fischer, this volume) and the psychological meaning of control at individual and cultural level (Yamaguchi, Okumura, Chua, Morio, & Yates, this volume). In addition, several chapters provide examples of studies in which the structure of a concept found at individual level is compared to the structure at country level (Leung & Bond, this volume; Lucas & Diener, this volume; McCrae & Terracciano, this volume; Mylonas, Pavlopoulos, & Georgas, this volume).
