Starting point of this project
Cultural diversity is inherited knowledge about the environment and people and therefore differs between regions. Edward Burnett Taylor first defined Culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Primitive Culture, 1871). One challenge is to describe the complex between culture and structure that is combined Mary Douglas and colleagues Grid-/Group theory of culture (Caulkins, 1999; Douglas, 1996; Mamadouh, 1999; Rayner & Gross, 1985; Spickard, 1989).
This theory positions each cultural group along the grid and the group dimension, assigning them specific cultural characteristics. From a structural perspective, the grid dimension describes the level of control exerted to which a member of society has to follow social norms (“What can I do?”). High grid societies show existence of a strong hierarchy with strict distinction between social classes. In contrast to that, individuals in low grid societies have more similar access to power and resources. From a cultural perspective, the group dimension defines the interdependence of an individual and a social group and how this influences the individual’s identity (“Who am I?”). In a high-group society, the individual strongly identifies with the group and the individual fulfillment is less relevant whereas, in a low-group society, the individual is the focal point.
Building on this idea, Molina et al. (2022) demonstrated that it was possible to predict cultural traits such as country of origin and religion (instances of the “grid” dimension) by examining the structural characteristics of personal networks of migrants in the USA and Spain (the “group” dimension).
The structural measures of personal networks, considered as samples of the social structures in which individuals are embedded, revealed a “cultural signature” indicating the existence of an underlying sociocultural continuum that has not been well understood until now.
Ways to measure the worldwide cultural diversity
The measurement of cultural diversity can be classified into three different approaches and address different levels of structure and cultural dimensions: ethnographic, cross-cultural surveys, and social media analysis.
- Ethnographic approaches collect rich qualitative data on both dimensions from study cases based on observation and narratives
- Cross-cultural surveys provide a quantitative wealth of data on the cultural dimension but hardly on the structural one
- Social Media sites contain both types of data massively, but just for the ones that share the same site (online networks) and, importantly, data protection regulations prevent researchers from accessing these data because gaining consent from users is not possible in practice.
Personal networks conceived as imprints of the cultural complex
Personal networks are the social environment of an individual (ego), involving all social relations with and between the social contacts (alters), such as family, friends, neighbors, and others. (see Bidart, Degenne, & Grossetti, 2020; McCarty, Lubbers, Vacca, & Molina, 2019; Perry, Pescosolido, & Borgatti, 2018). The personal networks are the building blocks of higher social structures. Hence in those personal networks, the project aims to identify cultural signatures as structural characteristic of a certain culture, independent from other factors like class, gender, or education (see Brandes et al. 2008).
Our steps towards the structure-culture complex
- Data collection I: Implementation of an international survey on personal networks to identify the structural properties
- Data collection II: Survey participants will provide their digital traces of Facebook and/or Instagram as well as their indicators of interests through data donation of social media accounts
- Data analysis I: Comparison between the distribution along the tight-loose cultural dimensions and the variation of personal network structures
- Data analysis II: Social media data will be used for a comparison of cultural distances, computed from a massive list of indicators (see Obradovich et al., 2022)
- Results: Definition of the relationship between the network data with each other to develop theoretical frameworks and indicators of “cultural signature”.
- Confirmation: The new frameworks will be validated with selected samples of cultural variation in cultural databases (Human Relations Area Files).
References
- Bidart, C., Degenne, A., & Grossetti, M. (2020). Living in Networks: The Dynamics of Social Relations. In Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences.
- Brandes, U., Lerner, J., Lubbers, M. J., McCarty, C., & Molina, J. L. (2008). Visual Statistics for Collections of Clustered Graphs. 2008 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, 47–54.
- Caulkins, D. D. (1999). Is Mary Douglas’s Grid/Group Analysis Useful for Cross-Cultural Research? Cross-Cultural Research, 33(1), 108–128.
- Douglas, M. (1996). Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology. London – New York: Routledge.
- Mamadouh, V. (1999). Grid-group cultural theory: an introduction. GeoJournal, 47(3), 395–409.
- McCarty, C., Lubbers, M. J., Vacca, R., & Molina, J. L. (2019). Conducting Personal Network Research: A Practical Guide.
- Obradovich, N., Özak, Ö., Martín, I., Ortuño-Ortín, I., Awad, E., Cebrián, M., … Cuevas, Á. (2022). Expanding the measurement of culture with a sample of two billion humans. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 19(190), 20220085. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0085
- Perry, B. L., Pescosolido, B. A., & Borgatti, S. P. (2018). Egocentric Network Analysis: Foundations, Methods, and Models.
- Rayner, S., & Gross, J. L. (1985). Measuring Culture: A Paradigm for the Analysis of Social Organization. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Spickard, J. V. (1989). A Guide to Mary Douglas’s Three Versions of Grid/Group Theory. Sociology of Religion, 50(2), 151–170.
