Part Iv Culture, Cognition and Response

Since the early 1980s, psychologists and survey methodologists have made considerable progress in understanding the cognitive and communicative processes underlying survey responding To date this research has paid limited attention to cultural differences. However, there is increasing evidence that there are cultural differences in how information is processed (for a review, see Oyserman & Lee, 2007, 2008a). In this chapter we provide a brief overview of the relevant research and explore its implications for survey response. We focus on the contrast that has received the most attention in cultural psychology, namely the contrast between East Asian and Western (Western Europe and North American) societies. These societies have been described as differing in their chronic or dominant focus on collectivism (embeddedness of individuals within social frames, interdependence among in-group members) vs. individualism (separation of individuals from social frames, independence of the self from others). While there is some evidence that results from East Asian samples cannot always be generalized to other collective societies (see Chapter 11, this volume), to date most of the relevant research on culture's consequences has focused on this comparison. Even if generalization is somewhat limited, using East Asian collectivism and Western individualism as a focal comparison allows us to build on this solid basis of well-developed conceptual frameworks and experimental evidence. Although the experimental tasks used by cultural psychology researchers do not directly parallel the tasks or situations studied by survey researchers, this body of research is relevant in that it illuminates cultural differences in processes known to be involved in answering survey questions. We Survey Methods in Multinational, Multiregional, and Multicultural Contexts, edited by Harkness et al. offer conjectures about the likely survey measurement implications of cultural psychology research and outline an agenda for future theory-driven research more directly tied to the needs of survey researchers. Needless to say, our focus on one set of cultural axes—individualism and collectivism—does not imply that variation along other cultural dimensions is irrelevant to survey measurement; it merely reflects that the cognitive consequences of other variations are not yet sufficiently understood to lend themselves to a fruitful discussion. The chapter is organized as follows. We first review core features of Western (individualist) and East Asian (collectivist) cultures and summarizes key differences in basic cognitive and communicative processes. We then provide an overview of respondents' tasks (question comprehension, recall, judgment, response formatting, and editing) and address how individualism and collectivism may …