The Seven Flaws of Cross-Cultural Psychology. The Story of Conversion

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Abstract
This is the story of a clinical psychologist who got interested in the relation between depression and social support and decided to study it cross-culturally. Let me call her Jane. Her idea was to take social support as an independent variable, and to operationalize it by three cultures, one highly supportive, the second with social support, and the third with low support structures. She took care to select these cultures conscientiously on the basis of anthropological reports, and she adapted an already proven questionnaire on depressive tendencies in order to make it "culture-free." She then had it translated and back-translated by students in her university who were natives of the chosen cultures, and with the help of psychology departments in those countries she found local researchers who appeared to be competent enough for her project. She had them come to her university in order to instruct them in the use of the questionnaire and the rationale of her project. It looked to her a neat and carefully prepared research design, and so it did to others, because she had no trouble finding the required funds. Yet, when the results came in, she found the data sent by the two researchers from Culture 3 to be inconsistent, and, her sabbatical year approaching, she decided to go and look for herself.

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