Conducting cross-cultural research in teams and the search for the "culture-proof" variable.
OBJECTIVE
Cross-cultural research must always deal with the problem that meaning systems and behaviors cannot be readily compared from one culture to the next because the sociocultural context can vary so widely.


METHODS
The organizers of Project AGE: Age, Generation, and Experience, a multicultural study of aging, recognized this problem and devised instruments for studying age that allowed for cultural variation as well as researchers made every effort to gain an emic understanding (understanding based on categories recognized by the local respondents) of people's attitudes about aging in the several cultures in which we worked. For comparison to take place, we needed to use similar question frames to elicit comparable information across societies of different types.


RESULTS
Many questions put to people about their attitudes toward their own and other persons' aging were readily understood by our respondents. But some topics proved difficult to investigate systematically across cultures.


CONCLUSIONS
In hindsight, we could have achieved additional value from our interviews if we had incorporated some independent measures of physical health and capacity. Such data would have added depth to our discussion of within-site and across-site differences on both the independent measures themselves and their possible correlation with attitudinal data.
Draper
Patricia
P
Department of Anthropology and Geography, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68506, USA. pdraper1@unl.edu
D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008593:Menopause; D012107:Research Design; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires