Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 657
Most are stored there because of their cultural or historical uniqueness, not
because of their potential use in social science comparisons. For such repositories
to be useful for testing generalizations in the social sciences, they would
have to ensure representative coverage of each category of data for each of the
societies and periods sampled and codify the items for systematic mass analysis.
Important steps in this direction have been taken through the application of
standardized procedures of textual analysis to such diverse 'process produced'
data as folktales, children's readers and newspaper editorials. A remarkable
rapprochement has occurred between the humanistic tranditions of qualitative
analysis in linguistic and folklore studies and the hard-headed frequency
counting pioneered by Harold Lasswell and his disciplesz1 in the study of political
communication and mass persuasion. A particularly promising example of
cross-national content analysis of cultural products is D. McClelland's The
Achieving Society.zz The recent development of electronic computer facilities
for content analysis of written doc~rnents~3 is certain to have a profound impact
on such research, and we can expect accelerated efforts in the near future for
the storing and codifying of data for such mass analysis.
Data from observations and descriptions of the institutions and pecularities
of different societies provide the basis for a rich literature of anecdotes and
idiosyncratic interpretations, but require detailed evaluation and codification
if they are to serve the needs of comparative social science.
The great pioneers in the study of primitive populations did much to standardize
the report-taking of travellers and missionaries and to ensure the
fullest possible coverage in each description. A number of attempts were made
to store and codify the materials from such descriptions. Decisive progress was
not achieved in this direction, however, until Peter Murdock and his colleagues
launched the Yale Cross-Cultural Survey in 1937, and later built up the Human
Relations Area Files,"4 This expanding repository of coded information on a
sample of the world's known societies25 has proved an essential tool in7the
development of designs and techniques for the analysis of cross-cultural variations.ZG
A large number of universities and research institutions subscribe to copies
of the Files, and increasingly in recent years scholars have tried their hand
at cross-cultural comparisons of this type. The Files aim at the fullest possible
coverage of a representative sample of all the world's societies and wil incorporate
information on societies at all levels of development, from pre-agricultural
tribes to highly industrialized nation-states. In practice, however, it has
proved very dificult to apply the traditional anthropological techniques of data
gathering and codification to advanced nation-states, and most of the crosscultural
comparisons have been limited to pre-literate units."'
The comparative study of industrializing nation-states grew out of a tradition
of systematic observation by tiavellers, journalists and itinerant scholars: the
pioneering analyses of Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Marx, Engels, Ostrogorski,
Michels, Bryce and Weber were all strongly influenced by experiences
of direct exposure to foreign manners and institutions. Weber's ambitious
attempt to build up a conceptual framework for the comparative study of the