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Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 647
of research procedures, but for different types of units. The term cross-societal,
still rare in the literature, was introduced to cover comparisons over a broad
range of territorially and culturally distinct collectivities, whether ‘primitive’,
‘transitional’ or fully developed.z The term cross-national has gained wider
acceptance, at least in the Anglo-American scholarly community: it is used to
describe comparisons across legally and politically distinct populations or systems
of interaction, typically developing or highly developed sovereign nationstates.
The current tendency is to reserve ‘cross-cultural’ for comparisons of
elementary societies of the type documented in such repositories as the Human
Relations Area Files, ‘cross-national’ for comparisons of societies at some higher
level of social, economic or political development, and ‘cross-societal’ for
comparisons across the entire range of human collectivities, whatever their
level of development.
These distinctions bear on only one of several dimensions to be taken into
account in the analysis of variations in research operations. It is not enough
merely to be told about the characteristics of the range of sites or units; there
are also important distinctions to be made in terms of the organization of each
study and the levels of the variables covered.
Cross-cultural, cross-societal or cross-national studies can clearly be organized
in a variety of ways: the study may be carried out on secondary materials
in one single centre or one single site, it may be initiated in one centre but
require data gathering by centres in the other cultures, societies or nations, or it
may be organized through close cooperation within a network of centres. A
study may be cross-national in character without being inter-national and international
without being cross-national.
RESEARCH
ORGANIZATION
SITES/UNITS OF STUDY
Within one nation Within several nations
I I1
In one The typical single- Typically secondary
nation nation study analysis of data al-
only ready available for
several nations
Ill Iv
6 1 Cooperative inter- The typical co-
several national research operative cross-
nations in one nation (e.g. national study
UNESCO in Germany)
In this terminology, the prefix cross- stresses the objects of comparison while the
prefix inter- relates to a characteristic of the research organization. This distinc-
tion has gained ground in Anglo-American discourse3 but is still difficult to
express in French: the difference between inter-national and international is not
yet widely accepted. ‘Transnational’ is a potential contender. A group of
psychologists currently engaged in the promotion of replications in a number
of countries prefer to describe their efforts as activities within transnational