Cross-cultural studies

Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called holocultural studies or comparative studies, is the specialization in anthropology & sister sciences sociology, psychology, economics, political science that uses field data from numerous societies to study the scope of human behavior & test hypotheses about human behavior and culture.

Cross-cultural studies is a third relieve oneself of cross-cultural comparisons. The first is comparison of effect studies, theis controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation, and the third is comparison within a pattern of cases. Unlike comparative studies, which examines similar characteristics of a few societies, cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample so that statistical analysis can be proposed to show relationships or lack of relationships between the traits in question. These studies are surveys of ethnographic data.

Cross-cultural studies are applied widely in the social sciences, particularly in cultural anthropology and psychology.

History

The first cross-cultural studies were carried out by 19th-century anthropologists such(a) as ] historians and especially historians of science started looking at the mechanism and networks by which knowledge, ideas, skills, instruments and books moved across cultures, generating new and fresh conviction concerning the grouping of things in nature. In Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean 1560–1660 Avner Ben-Zaken has argued that cross-cultural exchanges take place at a cultural hazy locus where the margins of one culture overlaps the other, creating a "mutually embraced zone" where exchanges have place on mundane ways. From such a stimulating zone, ideas, styles, instruments and practices keep on onward to the cultural centers, urging them to renew and update cultural notions.