Cross-Cultural Studies

Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called Holocultural Studies, is a specialization in anthropology and sister sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science) that uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and culture.

Cross-cultural studies is the third form of cross-cultural comparisons. The first is comparison of case studies, the second is controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation and the third is comparison within a sample of cases. Unlike comparative studies, which examine similar characteristics of a few societies, cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample so that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack or relationships between the traits in question. These studies are surveys of ethnographic data. Cross-cultural studies has been used by social scientists of many disciplines, particularly cultural anthropology and psychology.

At the ECPP2010 in Copenhagen the then President of the ENPP (currently President of IPPA) Antonella Delle Fave announced that the publishing company Springer Science would dedicate a volume of selected papers from the conference with cross-cultural contents (no proceedings) in the series on Cross-Cultural Positive Psychology. The papers have been collected and the editing process has been initiated. Expected publication: autumn 2011.