comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

individuals tend to assign shared meanings to the events, social artefacts, and objects
around them, it is possible to consider groupings at all levels of aggregation as having
elements of a culture. Families, peer groups, organizations, ethnicities, regions, and
nations may all be found to hold some shared perspectives. However, within the larger
groupings, there will inevitably be greater heterogeneity. “Thus, by seeking to identify
and understand the basis of differences between nations, we are engaged in a perilous
enterprise” (Smith, 2004b: 7). The concern is the degree to which researchers can avoid
providing tautological descriptions of cultural differences, as we have been describing
nations in ways that are dependent on the individuals within them and have been using
psychological measures as the initial data. The members of a culture adopt sets of
behaviours that are survival and success orientated in a particular ecology, and teach
these sets of behaviours to new members of the culture. As the ecology changes, new
behaviours are identified and adopted. The culture is a continually changing feedback
system. This fallacy of using “nation” as a valid variable is related to the Ecological
Fallacy. The Ecological Fallacy is a basis for debates concerning sampling and levels of
analysis issues. However, the Ecological Fallacy may be a fallacy, stemming from the
complexity of the environments in social science research and our inability to
sufficiently measure and control for influential variables.
The Fallacy of the Ecological Fallacy
The “ecological fallacy” is a logical fallacy inherent in making causal or correlational
inferences from group data to individual behaviours. The fallacy was identified by
Thorndike (1939), named by Selvin (1958), and demonstrated by Robinson (1950).
Robinson demonstrated that the correlation coefficient between two individual-level
variables is generally not the same as that between those same variables for aggregates
into which the individuals are grouped. Sharon Schwartz (1994) discusses the problem
as due to failures in prediction, control, and analysis in experiment design related to
Internal and Construct Validity. Sharon Schwartz proposes that if our experimental
designs and data collection were better, variable scores at any level would be highly
correlated with scores at other levels.
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