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

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 665
different sorts of Socialist polities (Poland, Yugoslavia and, interestingly,
Castroite Cuba) and in seven typically ‘developing’ countries (Panama, the
Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria and India).47
A number of comparative studies have centred on factors of change and
modernization in the developing countries. David M~Clelland4~ was able to
replicate his ‘n-Achievement’ test on different samples in Brazil, Germany,
India, Italy, Japan, Poland and Turkey, and developed an intriguing theory of
the personality syndromes most likely to produce entrepreneurial talents in
developing countries. Alex Inkeles administered a I rg-item test of ‘attitudinal
modernity’ to matched ‘common man’ samples in Argentina, Chile, India,
Israel and Nigeria,49 and Sidney Verba was able to finance a study of attitudes
to social and political changes in two of these countries, India and Nigeria, for a
comparative analysis with corresponding data for Japan and the United States
(Mexico had been included in the original scheme but had to be dropped in the
wake of project Camelot). A major comparative study of attitudes to economic
growth is currently (1970) in the planning stage at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology: this wil be directed by Frederick Frey.
A number of psychologists found it tempting to replicate their tests and techniques
in foreign countries. A pioneer in the field of psychological measurement,
Charles Osgood, succeeded in persuading colleagues in nearly twenty language
communities to use his Semantic Differential Te~hnique.5~ The Andersons were
able to replicate their ‘Incomplete Story’ test in some ten countries to explore
differences in student-teacher relations in democratic vs. authoritarian environments,
and Lambert and Klineberg sampled children of different ages in nine
countries to test hypotheses on the growth of stereotypes of foreign pe0ples.5~
Among anthropologists, the Whitings took the lead in the development of
standardized schedules for the recording of information about child-rearing
practices, and organized an important six-culture data gathering operation
much on the same lines as the typical cross-national survey.52
None of these efforts attracted quite as much scholarly attention as the
attempts made within political sociology and behavioural political science to
accumulate new data and generate new insights through cross-national survey
operations. The best known and in many ways the most controversial and
stimulating of these was the five-country study reported on by Gabriel Almond
and Sidney Verba in The Civic Culture, a comparative survey of cross-sections
of the adult populations of the United States, Great Britain, theFederal Republic
of Germany, Italy and Mexico.53 A number of political sociologists
devoted to cross-national comparisons preferred to work with secondary data
for a wider range of countries: Seymour Martin Lipset, William Kornhauser
and Robert Alford relied on data from independently conducted commercial
polls and surveys and tried to place the findings in broader perspectives of
history and theory.54 Sociologists such as Daniel Lerner55 and political scientists
such as Karl Deutschs6 were able to organize extensive studies of elite
attitudes in Western Europe and sought to link up evidence from such top-level
interviews with secondary evidence from mass surveys. The active team of electoral
analysts at the Survey Research Center moved into Europe country by