ABSTRACT
The Human Relations Area Files, Inc., centered at Yale University, is an incorporated, not for profit, international research organization sponsored by over twenty major universities and museums. Since 1949, the Human Relations Area Files has devoted its resources to developing programs and services to encourage and facilitate the worldwide comparative study of culture, society, and human behavior. The purpose of the Human Relations Area Files is to provide a systematically organized body of information on various regions and culture areas for scientific, historical, and other research, and to provide, through the inclusion of information on a valid sample of all world cultures, a tool for testing hypotheses and generalizations about human behavior especially on a cross-cultural basis. The Human Relations Area Files contains minutely analyzed published and unpublished works on a significant number of the world's cultures and societies. The Human Relations Area Files are organized into culture files, with each file containing information on a particular cultural group.
